Alisha Pradhan

Research to date in AI and dementia has primarily focused on medical and care-giver applications. This study complements prior work by collecting qualitative data from individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and mild-to-moderate dementia, uncovering their perspectives, envisioned use cases, and anticipated challenges with generative AI applications. Findings uncover ways people with MCI and dementia want to use AI to engage in resilience building activities related to fostering wellness, building social connections, and finding purpose. However, each of these use cases came with tradeoffs in embracing healthy thinking. Based on these findings, we discuss directions for future work in AI for resilience building in dementia. We intend for this work to lay the groundwork for future research in AI design and development to empower people living with dementia to engage in resilience building activities, which may have lasting positive impacts on their mental health and well-being.

Till date, research on technology design to support aging has largely adopted human-centered approaches, such as user-centered and participatory design. While this body of work continues to yield insights on technologies for older individuals, recent research is beginning to question whether other ways of knowing, that are not solely “humanistic”, can yield new understandings on technologies for aging. We pick up this call, and present emerging findings from our interviews with older adults around their use of home-based intelligent voice assistants. Building upon these findings, we discuss how attuning to the nonhuman agency and the larger material world can offer new insights on technology design for aging, such as, speak to issues of technology non-use by older adults. We discuss implications of assigning responsibility and accountability beyond older adults to nonhuman actors and how it can speak to the deficit-centered narrative that often gets associated with aging.