Used By, Not Used On: An Adaptive Systems Framework to Design Technology for and with People with Dementia

Abstract

Technology-mediated support for people living with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or dementia often aims to assist with everyday activities, yet such systems can also reproduce deficit-oriented framings or introduce tensions around privacy, autonomy, and control. These tensions become salient as dementia progresses and people’s cognitive, sensory, communicative, and interactional abilities change over time. In this poster, we propose an adaptive systems framework for designing dementia technologies that can adapt to changing abilities while preserving people’s ability to define what systems know and do on their behalf. Drawing on prior work in context-aware computing, mixed-initiative interaction, automation, notification design, and person-centered dementia design, our framework decomposes adaptive systems into four user-configurable modules: sensing/system input scope, inference scope, assistance authority, and output delivery strategy. We demonstrate the framework through a leaving-home reminder use case, showing how a single support scenario can be configured across different privacy preferences, sensory needs, and desired levels of assistance.