Prompting Technology and Persons With Dementia: The Significance of Context and Communication.

Background And Objectives: Smart home auto-prompting has the potential to increase the functional independence of persons with dementia (PWDs) and decrease caregiver burden as instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) are completed at home. To improve prompting technologies, we sought to inductively understand how PWDs responded to auto-prompting while performing IADL tasks.

Research Design And Methods: Fifteen PWDs completed eight IADLs in a smart home testbed and received a hierarchy of verbal auto-prompts (indirect, direct, multimodal) as needed for task completion.