Can You Keep a Secret? Exploring AI for Care Coordination in Cognitive Decline

TL;DR

This paper investigates how AI agents can assist in care coordination for older adults with cognitive decline, focusing on privacy, autonomy, and reducing caregiver burden through strategies like piggybacking.

Contribution

It explores the potential of AI to facilitate care coordination strategies such as piggybacking, aiming to support aging-in-place without increasing caregiver burden.

Findings

Caregivers and older adults use delegation and information control to manage care.

Piggybacking is an effective strategy to reduce caregiver effort.

AI agents could potentially support care coordination without compromising privacy.

Abstract

The increasing number of older adults who experience cognitive decline places a burden on informal caregivers, whose support with tasks of daily living determines whether older adults can remain in their homes. To explore how agents might help lower-SES older adults to age-in-place, we interviewed ten pairs of older adults experiencing cognitive decline and their informal caregivers. We explored how they coordinate care, manage burdens, and sustain autonomy and privacy. Older adults exercised control by delegating tasks to specific caregivers, keeping information about all the care they received from their adult children. Many abandoned some tasks of daily living, lowering their quality of life to ease caregiver burden. One effective strategy, piggybacking, uses spontaneous overlaps in errands to get more work done with less caregiver effort. This raises the questions: (i) Can agents help with piggyback coordination? (ii) Would it keep older adults in their homes longer, while not increasing caregiver burden?