Towards Aging-in-Place: Automatic Assessment of Product Usability for Older Adults with Dementia

Considerations of how to facilitate aging-in-place are becoming increasingly pertinent as caregivers are overwhelmed by an aging population. A primary challenge to independent living is the inability to use products associated with tasks of daily living. As improving the usability of these products for the elderly will extend their independence, this work attempts to automate and expedite the assessment of usability using artificial intelligence. Video analysis is performed to temporally segment video of human-product interaction and automatically identify segments in which the human has difficulty operating the product. The approach is applied to the study of water faucet designs for older adults with dementia. Empirical analysis is performed on videos of dementia patients operating various faucet types, demonstrating the accuracy of the temporal segmentation (88.1%) and the ability to estimate the relative advantage of either design in terms of operational ease.