Friendsourcing the unmet needs of people with dementia

Abstract

The decay of cognitive abilities associated with dementia severely impacts the quality of life of a person and his surrounding ecosystem. First, people with dementia (PwD) increasingly forget the events in their lives leading to depression, isolation and faster cognitive deterioration. Second, their caregivers, besides the emotional burden that having someone close in such a condition carries, are also likely to be overwhelmed with responsibilities and duties in maintaining the PwD with a balanced and decent lifestyle. Our approach tries to address this by providing a prosthetic memory captured in two ways: 1) automatically captures data from the PwD's smartphone and enriches it with automatically retrieved data from the web and, 2) a private social network group (friendsourcing) used to validate and personalize the relevant events in the PwD's life. By sharing the load among a limited but still populated set of trustworthy people we aim to maintain the caregiving process feasible and maintain more people engaged with the PwD. Overall, the ultimate goal is to provide reminiscence, safety and cognitive aids for the PwD that are up-to-date and personally relevant.