Agents and Dementia: Smart Risk Assessment

This paper describes an early stage of applied research primar- ily concerned with the development of mobile, wearable and other smart technology to assist people with mild to moderate symptoms of dementia. With safety and security paramount, the primary objective is to prolong independence of the person with symptoms and provide an element of relief to families from what can become a full-time burden of care. In- telligent agents recognise activity, its context, risk and subsequently, in the worst case act to recover persons who wander or become lost. Initial results indicate that constant activity monitoring without ethically con- troversial tracking is possible without the necessity of invading privacy. The small-scale participatory study will incorporate real-world needs of a recruited user group into the design of a research prototype.