Georgia Institute of Technology
I'm working in a project managed by Kala Jordan and Dr. Maribeth Coleman to gain primary research on how people with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) interact within a kitchen setting. My research goal is to help develop technological solutions to support adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), such as Artificial Intelligence assistants, with cooking and other daily tasks for independent living. I conduct experiments in the CEP (Cognitive Impairment Program) kitchen at Emory with participants to collect data on how they interact with the provided technologies to cook meals. In my kitchen sessions, I work with caretakers and MCI participants to facilitate them preparing several recipes within the session. We collect data such as key words mentioned while cooking, wearable data such as movement patterns and frequencies, recorded videos of the sessions for analysis, and participant feedback and general information. I analyze the collected data, edit the raw footage, and transcribe audio, as well as collecting the necessary research materials and working with the participants. In the future, I hope to help my lab collaborate to utilize more technologies within our sessions and effectively analyze the data to be used in simulations or forecasting use cases in other labs. We also hope to expand our operations into the AWARE Home at Georgia Tech, which is an experimental home-setting lab that has extensive data-collection abilities through technological integrations into many aspects of the lab. My project's arena is primarily focused on researching foundational human-computer interactions, deploying sensory equipment into home settings for cooking sessions to promote independent living, labeling and sorting the data collected from sessions, collecting the analyzed information into a framework for Artificial Intelligence processing and modeling, and prototyping designs and implementations that utilize our collected data for user interfaces to help solve these crucial issues. In the next year and beyond, I hope to contribute with my research to the AI-CARING Institute's effort to assist people with MCI to live independently and perform daily tasks such as cooking using integrated technologies.