iPlant - Interactive Plant for Cognitive Accessibility
call: H2020-ICT-2017
funding scheme: RIA
activity: ICT-23
The continuous improvement of digital services, such as ecommerce and smart home appliances, increases quality of life of a broad number of users and digital communication tools facilitate the participation to the social activities. However, users with cognitive disabilities might find hard to use the current interfaces of such services. In the particular case of elderly people with cognitive decline, they do not benefit from standard services interfaces because such technologies are not tailored to the specific needs of elderly users with cognitive decline. iPlant proposes a robotic plant as interface for accessibility that enables seniors with cognitive disabilities (from mild cognitive impairment to early stage of dementia) to be introduced in the continuous use of digital technologies providing connection to their everyday environment and to be connected with their social partners. Both aspects are used for neurorehabilitation of cognitive functions in real life-like settings. To achieve this goal, iPlant relies on three essential ideas for effective accessing to digital services: a) the interface has to be present in the living context as an affective social agent, b) the senior with cognitive impairment has to be familiar with the design of an easy-to-use interface without complicated controllers, c) the interface has to adapt to the progressing decline or training-related improvement of cognitive abilities. The last aspect requires a proactive monitoring of the cognitive changes to guarantee adaptable support in the use of iPlant. iPlant will promote the acceptance and deployment of a novel interface for accessibility to digital services with acceptable and easy-to-use features for seniors. IPlant is validated and demonstrated with senior volunteers in two scenarios: a) the support of activities of daily living at home and b) the encouragement of the social inclusion of the users facilitating the communication with other social actors and informal caregivers.
