SGER: Designing and developing mobile computing infrastructures and architectures to support people with cognitive disabilities and caregivers in authentic everyday tasks

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The PI and his colleagues, as members of the Cognitive Levers (CLever) research team within the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design at the University of Colorado at Boulder, have suggested that a suitable mobile architecture could support activities for daily living for people with cognitive disabilities. The PI argues that in order to design cost-effective, intelligent technologies to connect caregivers and members of the target community, we must leverage existing handheld and data network technologies and identify critical technologies necessary to complement and address gaps in current mobile, ubiquitous computing environments and platforms. The PI notes that the recent commercial introduction of a new generation of mobile handheld devices that combine Wi-Fi and wide-area cellular data technology provides a potentially cost-effective platform upon which to build and evaluate prototype components. In this exploratory project, the PI and his team will investigate the feasibility of their ideas. They will design mobile architectures based on theories of distributed intelligence ranging from "thin client" architectures to peer-to-peer networks. They will obtain performance data from real-world systems while carrying out authentic tasks, thereby obtaining specific content specifications. They will investigate the limits of the targeted technologies with respect to: connectivity between base and mobile stations, data accessibility, and throughput; location-awareness; technical sufficiency of commercial handheld devices; and overall architecture design. The PI expects that project outcomes will enable him to develop grounded theories and effective architectures for the use of new technologies in this field.Broader Impacts: The target community for this research has traditionally been under-served by society. This exploratory "stress test" of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) mobile technologies with laboratory prototype components (MfA, MAPS, LifeLine), while performing real-world tasks, in order to understand current capabilities, constraints, and technical requirements, should catalyze rapid and innovative advances in the design of a robust, mobile socio-technical environment to effectively support people with cognitive disabilities and their caregivers in authentic everyday living activities.