Achievement

Adri Seelye, one of our IGERT trainees from the Department of Psychology, is using smart environment technologies to assess the benefit of automatic task prompting to help older adults with dementia to initiate and complete Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). Adri's advisers are from Psychology and Computer Science and they are mentoring her on techniques for assessing the functional well-being and intervention effectiveness for older adults. She is conducting a study with over 200 volunteer older adult participants in the smart apartment. Initial findings indicate consistency between lab-based assessment and activity difficulties for participants with early onset dementia. These findings support the hypothesis that prompting is effective for helping older adults to initiate and complete ADLs. This past year, Adri published a multidisciplinary paper on these results together with authors from Computer Science and from Statistics.