A Smart Range Helping Cognitively-Impaired Persons Cooking

Abstract

People suffering from a loss of autonomy caused by a cognitive deficit generally have to perform important daily tasks (such as cooking) using devices and appliances designed for healthy people, which do not take into consideration their cognitive impairment. Using these devices is risky and may lead to a tragedy (e.g. fire). A potential solution to this issue is to provide automated systems, which perform tasks on behalf of the patient. However, clinical studies have shown that encouraging users to maintain their autonomy greatly help to preserve health, dignity, and motivation. Therefore, we present in this paper a new smart range prototype allowing monitoring and guiding a cognitively-impaired user in the activity of preparing a meal. This new original prototype is capable of giving adapted prompting to the user in the completion of several recipes by exploiting load cells, heat sensors and electromagnetic contacts embedded in the range. We currently own a provisional patent on this new invention, and we completed a first experimental phase.