Design, adoption, and assessment of a socio-technical environment supporting independence for persons with cognitive disabilities

Abstract

A significant fraction of persons with cognitive disabilities are potentially able to live more independently with the use of powerful tools embedded in their social environment. The Memory Aiding Prompting System (MAPS) provides an environment in which caregivers can create scripts that can be used by people with cognitive disabilities ("clients") to support them in carrying out tasks that they would not be able to achieve by themselves. To account for the great diversity among clients, MAPS was developed as a meta-design environment, empowering the caregivers to develop personalized prompting systems for the specific needs of individual clients.