Insights from Designing Context-Aware Meal Preparation Assistance for Older Adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Their Care Partners

TL;DR

This study develops and evaluates context-aware assistive technologies for meal preparation tailored to older adults with MCI, emphasizing personalization and collaboration with care partners through iterative design phases.

Contribution

It introduces a user-centered iterative design process that explores context-aware assistance for meal prep, highlighting key contextual factors and personalization strategies.

Findings

Identified three key contexts: routine-based, real-time, and situational.

Provided actionable design strategies for personalized meal prep assistance.

Demonstrated the importance of collaboration between older adults and care partners.

Abstract

Older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) often face challenges during meal preparation, such as forgetting ingredients, skipping steps, or leaving appliances on, which can compromise their safety and independence. Our study explores the design of context-aware assistive technologies for meal preparation using a user-centered iterative design process. Through three iterative phases of design and feedback, evolving from low-tech lightbox to a digital screen, we gained insights into managing diverse contexts and personalizing assistance through collaboration with older adults with MCI and their care partners. We concluded our findings in three key contexts--routine-based, real-time, and situational--that informed strategies for designing context-aware meal prep assistance tailored to users' needs. Our results provide actionable insights for creating technologies to assist meal preparation that are personalized for the unique lifestyles of older adults with MCI, situated in the complex and dynamic homebound context, and respecting the collaboration between older adults and their care partners.