Leveraging Skills into Independent Living- Distributed Cognition and Cognitive Disability

In the US alone over four and a half million people have cognitive disabilities.Except for deficiencies of mnemonic and executive capabilities many of themhave the potential to live a more independent life. In this book the authordescribes a design approach and an example system aimed at providingsupport to those missing abilities in a socio-technical environment. The systemMAPS consists of two technical components: a script design tool thatallows a caregiver to create store edit and reuse scripts of multimediaprompts to guide users thru tasks and a PDA-based prompter that playsthose scripts for persons with cognitive disabilities. The process of technologyadoption was also studied as the MAPS system was put in use doing real-lifetasks in home shopping and employment environments. By extendinghuman-computer interaction (HCI) frameworks theories and perspectivesthis research shows new ways of using traditional HCI in the design and useof prompting systems. More importantly this study presents a set of heuristicsto aid in the general design of assistive technology with an aim ofpreventing technology abandonment.