Intelligent user interfaces to support diagnosis and assessment of people with dementia: An expert evaluation

Abstract

This paper presents the main user/clinician interface and the mechanisms of a sensors-based system to support clinicians’ diagnosis for people suffering from Alzheimer disease and dementia. The system monitors the patient at a lab or a home environment when he/she tries to accomplish specific tasks or ordinary daily activities. The main goal of the system is to support both the clinical assessment and therapy. The system can be divided into two main parts: (a) the sensors, which monitor the patients and (b) the clinician user interface, which includes the main system operation as well as the results of the monitoring. The data between these two parts is transferred and interpreted by using knowledge-driven interpretation techniques based on Semantic Web technologies. In order to evaluate the interface satisfaction, the usefulness and the ease of use of the clinician interface both for the lab and home environments, an expert evaluation was conducted with 2 groups of professionally active psychologists with dementia expertise (14 psychologists for the lab and 10 for the home environment). The results of the questionnaire-based evaluation showed that the clinicians are quite positive about the use of the system as a supporting method to dementia assessment and therapy.