Interactive Cognitive Interface and Health Monitoring System

Soldiers coping with injuries such as Traumatic Brain Injury and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (MCI/TBI) are in need of innovative solutions that will attempt to make their daily functioning easier while gaining independence. Even though soldiers with such injuries may be high functioning in some aspects of life, they still require a compensatory strategy for performing activities of daily living. The CAMRIS/CogniFit team will develop the initial plan, concept design and illustration for an interactive, low cost, effective cognitive interface system to support soldiers living with minor cognitive impairments. The Personal Autominder Coach Enhancement (PACE) system will focus on supporting some activities of daily living and provide assistance in self health maintenance by identifying each user's cognitive weaknesses. The proposed PACE system will interact with Autominder (Pollack 2006) developed for both older adults and with patients of various ages who have traumatic brain injury using advanced Artificial Intelligence techniques. We intend to enhance on the psychosocial aspects of health provider and patient interaction by using a “personal coach” approach that will include trust and affect, which have been shown to change treatment outcomes. We concur with the fact that augmenting trust between human users and machines have also been shown to influence the combined system performance. Our approach incorporates techniques used in building computational social agents (Miller, 2004) to encourage meaningful human-system interactions. By building a training routine based on user weaknesses, we believe we will create a significant improvement in overall functioning of MCI soldiers.