The Design of an Interactive Assistive Kitchen System

ABSTRACT

As the world's elderly population drastically increases, aging-related cognitive impairments have become one of the biggest healthcare concerns. In this paper, we present the design of an assistive kitchen system consisting of a user interface with two-way speech communication and an automated cabinet system to help promote aging-in-place. The assistive kitchen system incorporates a cognitive assistance feature that helps the user in overcoming initiation, planning, attention, and memory deficits, while performing kitchen-based activities of daily living (ADLs) such as storing and retrieving items, and obtaining recipes for meal preparation. This feature works synchronously with the automated kitchen cabinet to directly provide the location of an item to a user, bring the item in closer reach and also prompt the user to retrieve the item. An initial prototype of the assistive kitchen system has been developed and performance testing has been conducted. The testing has shown high success rates for users' retrieving and storing specified kitchen items. A small scale study was also conducted measuring the acceptance and use of the proposed system by older adults. The results show promise for the further development and use of the system for the outlined kitchen ADLs.

Keywords:

• assistive kitchen system
• automated cabinet
• item retrieval/storage