Achievement

Mild Cognitive Impairment is a stage where individuals begin to have difficulty completing everyday activities. We assess participants from this group using questionnaires, lab-based assessment, and monitoring activities performed in a smart home. Our data revealed that the MCI participants were taking longer to complete the everyday tasks and were committing more errors on the tasks in comparison to healthy older adults. Data from activities where participants are cued by the experimenter if they make an error suggests that greater cueing is occurring for those tasks that are more complex and require more steps to task completion. While comparison of data across the lab and smart home is generally consistent, participants tend to show better recall and temporal order memory for smart home tasks than for laboratory tasks. These results shed light on the ecological validity of testing procedures and suggest new approaches for assessing memory performance and cognitive function.