Project Summary/Abstract
Family members with a relative with dementia often face complex, and stressful life situations that
many other caregivers do not. Multiple factors make the adjustment to the caregiving role
particularly hard, as the caregiver balances this role with other demands, including child rearing,
careers, and relationships. For people with dementia, perceptible capabilities, fundamental
information-processing capabilities and previously acquired knowledge are generally limited,
making it difficult to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information. Tasks such
as making breakfast or teeth brushing may become too difficult to complete independently and
an inability to remember events that occurred only a few days, hours, or even minutes previously
makes day-to-day decision-making and navigating built environments difficult. The recall of
routes and tasks may be unpredictable, therefore caregivers are often left with the constant
and repetitive responsibility of prompting and cueing the care recipient, leading to additional
stress in their caregiving role. This project aims to develop a low-cost wearable device to
improve the quality and sustainability of dementia homecare that is beneficial to both care
recipients and caregivers, and potentially create a new paradigm to provide assistance and care
to individuals with dementia in a home environment. This innovative cognitive assistive
technology, called CATcare, will be specifically designed to provide two-way assistance to the
dementia caregiver and care recipient dyad living at home, enabling the individual with dementia
more independence and situational awareness in the home setting, as well as improving his or
her quality of life with less reliance on the caregiver. Caregivers, on the other hand, will be able
to fully program, adjust, and customize the system for a given living environment according to the
care recipient’s current habits, needs and conditions. This device can potentially prolong the
period that the dementia patients stay at home and age in place, reducing the financial burden to
both government and individuals as well as emotional and physical stress to caregivers. The
proposed CATcare prototype not only encapsulates the newest hardware innovations (including
smartglass and smartphone) but also advanced software solutions (including state-of-the-art
image processing, machine learning, computer vision techniques). In conclusion, this project will
lead to the integration and development of an affordable, portable and versatile wearable
intervention to address the long-standing and fast-growing challenges facing current and future
dementia homecare.