CALL FOR PAPERS:

AAAI 2002 Workshop on Automation as Caregiver: The Role of Intelligent
Technology in Elder Care 

July 29, 2002, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

As the cognitive and physical health of elders begins to deteriorate, they
require increasing assistance from caregivers. The strain on families and
individuals is enormous. In many cases people are turning to technological
solutions to aid in care giving for this elderly population. While much of
this technology continues to occupy traditional assistive roles such as
walking, door opening and communication, increasingly advanced technological
solutions are now being proposed and developed to aid in monitoring,
cognitive support and direct automation of tasks. In addition, failure to
consider the humans' needs, desires, capabilities and limitations will lead
to unsatisfactory technological solutions at best, and disasters at worst. 

By bringing together researchers from robotics, artificial intelligence and
human factors, this workshop will help foster a coordinated solution for
automation as caregiver for the elderly. We are interested in submissions
covering both integrated solutions as well as particular components. 

Topics

  Assistive technology:  devices that aid with mobility, medication
  management, and household tasks. 

  Cognitive Aids: technology that supports declining cognitive skills,
  including reminders, task instruction, and methods to reduce cognitive
  effort. 

  Passive Monitoring: devices and reasoning systems that recognize the
  elder's activity and learn to detect abnormal situations. 

  Decision-making: reasoning systems that respond to situations and the
  elder's needs by interacting with devices in the home, interacting with the
  elder, or contacting caregivers. 

  Human factors: interfaces that meet elder's needs and capabilities --
  motor, sensory and cognitive. 

  Adaptation: techniques to recognize the elder's changing capabilities. 

Specific technologies that support one or more of these areas include
robotics, computer vision, speech understanding, knowledge representation,
planning, machine learning, situation assessment, task tracking, agents,
software architectures and human computer/robot interfaces. 

Format 

The technical program will include presentations on contributed papers, panel
discussions, and an invited talk by a geriatric specialist, describing the
reasons elders move out of their homes, and potential roles for automation.
Attendance is limited to 50 participants. Non-presenters interested in
attending should submit a one-page statement of interest to the organizers. 

Submissions 

Submissions should be no more than 5 pages and formatted according to the
AAAI style files. Papers are due March 15, 2002, and sent via email to Karen
Haigh (pdf or postscript). 

Committee

Karen Haigh, Chair (khaigh@htc.honeywell.com)
Holly Yanco (holly@cs.uml.edu)
Barry Brumitt (barry@microsoft.com)
Michael Coen (mhcoen@ai.mit.edu)
Victor Lesser (lesser@cs.umass.edu)

Additional Information

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~khaigh/AAAI02.html