Fostering Independent Living in the Aging Population through Proactive Paging

Contemporary societies are facing a dramatic, pervasive increase in age-related cognitive impairment, such as dementia. Dementia is characterized by a slow and progressive decline of declarative memory and cognitive abilities resulting from various pathological conditions that cause brain cell damage. As a consequence of cognitive decline, demented people lose their independence and their capacity to live autonomously. Cognitive impairment is the largest cause of dependence worldwide, and about half of all people with dementia depend upon personal care to carry out daily activities and represent a significant cost for healthcare systems. The ability to remember to carry out planned daily activities at the appropriate temporal and spatial conditions (i.e. prospective memory) is indeed a significantly and consistently compromised cognitive function in demented people, and possibly also in elderly people who complain of a reduced intellectual efficiency but who are otherwise cognitively and neurologically unaffected. An efficient prospective memory capacity is fundamental to preserve independence and autonomy in daily life, to preserve social relations within the community, and to comply with own health needs. The project presented in this chapter aims at fostering independence and autonomy in elderly people without or with early clinical signs of dementia by improving their working memory and prospective memory capacity through the adoption of assistive smartphone technology. From a technological point of view, the project aims at leveraging the recent developments in mobile and context-aware computing to be able to provide “smart” suggestions to individuals by automatically analysing their environment and recognizing locations and time frames that are well suited to the completion of user's tasks. In this chapter, the authors describe the social, clinical, and economic motivations of the project and its technological development.