Design and assessment of enabling environments for cooking activities

Abstract

Assistive technologies can help cognitively impaired people in planning and memory tasks [1]. To provide efficient assistance, pervasive environments should be able to adapt assistance to the user's capacities, the activity to perform and the context. This paper presents an analysis of a cooking activity performed by a user with intellectual disability in a pervasive environment, named Archipel. The objective is to assess the impact of this environment on the activity processing. The activity analysis is based on ergonomic and neuropsychological methods. The results show that Archipel has a positive impact on the user's self-determination and independence. Further improvements should take into account the cognitive deficits presented by the people and ergonomic principles to provide more appropriate assistance.