Cognitive prostheses for elderly people

The proportion of the elderly population in many countries is increasing sharply. The number of elderly people who have dementia or have other difficulties and are in need of support in their daily life will correspondingly increase. Appropriately designed technology can help us to meet this challenge by providing cognitive assistance. For healthy elderly people who want to find creative and engaging ways to share their reminiscences, we have been working on systems which allow them to make use of the Internet to collect and build their own personalised reminiscence Web site. For people who are quite severely affected by dementia, with no functioning short-term memory, we have been developing ways in which they could still enjoy speaking about the past, assisted by a multimedia system. For people with dementia who are still in their own homes we have been developing the elements needed for a 24 hour computer-based prompting system.