Enhancing a Mobile Cognitive Orthotic - A User-Centered Design Approach

Enhancing a Mobile Cognitive Orthotic

  The ageing population of our modern societies and the future explosion of the number of the persons with cognitive impairments (CI) lead to a real problem of care at home and activities in mobility. To foster the mobility of people with cognitive impairments, cognitive orthotics on mobile devices can have a major impact on patients and caregivers quality of life. But patient and caregivers must be involved in the design process of such orthotics. In this paper we describe a mobile cognitive orthotic, the iterative user-centered approach used to develop it, and the field tests conducted. In particular we show how the user-centered approach enabled the improvement of the design and usability of an already developed mobile cognitive orthotic. This approach also provided invaluable cues and hints to new context-aware features. Caregivers and patients were deeply involved in the process and two field studies were conducted in a real setting with people with schizophrenia and people with head traumas. The long term goal is to develop context-aware features of the mobile system to fulfill the ubiquitous needs of a user with CI.