Defining <i>Personas</i> for Assistive Technology Development: Improving the Cognitive Support of Older Adults on the Dementia Continuum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Executive function operations (Formulate a Goal, Plan, Carry out the task and Verify goal attainment) are important for supporting independence, and are often impacted early in dementia, yet are seldom considered in the design of assistive technologies for cognition for older adults with dementia. This article introduces personas, i.e., fictitious, specific, concrete representations of target users, to support the design of assistive technologies for cognition from the perspective of executive dysfunction. We first categorized the assistance most appropriate to provide, based on a quantitative secondary analysis of annotated videos of 16 older adults who received assistance during a functional assessment. The annotations of the videos classified the assistance required for task completion into categories. We then designed the personas based on this quantitative secondary analysis. A persona was designed for each of the first three executive function operations: Formulate a goal, Plan and Carry out the task. No persona was designed for Verify goal attainment because assistance was seldom provided for this operation. Stimulate the thought process and clarification of instructions were the categories of assistance most frequently identified overall. Each persona is illustrated with examples of assistance. Stimulate the thought process was the category of assistance most frequently provided for goal formulation and plan, and motivational assistance for carry out the task. We defined several design recommendations to support the design of assistive technologies for cognition for older adults on the dementia continuum, including 1) stimulate the person to reason and act by themselves first; 2) design context-aware assistive technologies; 3) consider “goal formulation” and “plan” executive operation dysfunctions; 4) personalize assistive technologies to the specific needs of each individual; 5) do not rely only on personas to take individual needs into account. Personas created from real situations can serve as a tool to better understand the assistance this population requires in order to develop assistive technologies for cognition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".