Virtual collaborative kitchen
Résumé
The cognitive deficiencies (CDs) are the spectrum of deficiencies related to the reduction of the brain cognitive capability. They mainly affects reasoning, planning and solving capabilities of daily performed activities with the consequence cognitively impaired people become dependent by family or Health Institutes. Some of them are Alzheimer's disease (AD), traumatic brain injuries (TBI), schizophrenia and autism. For cognitively impaired people, meal preparation is a privileged moment and a good opportunity to enhance autonomy, to combat the deficiency effects and a good mean to promote self-esteem as well as social interactions. These are the goals of the Virtual Community Kitchen (VCK) intended for the people affected by CD. The VCK will be an opportunity for a group of this people to connect and meet, for instance once a week, and to attend at distance to a cooking lesson given by a grand chef. Each person will be in his kitchen and will prepare the meal along with the chef. The chef will be remotely able to supervise and to help people. At the end of the activity everyone will eat the meal in her kitchen linked to each participant. VCK focuses on two aspects: autonomous cognitive assistance for meal preparation in a kitchen and cognitive assistance and social interactions in a networked community for cognitively impaired people. A pervasive cognitive assistant in the kitchen. A dynamic context-aware cognitive Virtual Kitchen Assistant (VKA) for meal preparation will be installed in each kitchen and it will share the control between the assistants and the user. Its user interfaces will be a mix of graphical (GUI) and tangible user interfaces (TUI) designed in way to best support augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) approach. AAC is an area of research, clinical and educational practice with the objective to compensate temporary or permanent impairments and activity limitation of individuals with speech and comprehension disorders thanks to any system or device which let them to represents meaningful messages. The meal preparation and related tasks will be defined according to the task analysis best practice. The step by step assistance will mix images, audio notes and video sequences and it will be initiated either by the VKA when it detects the step is over, either by the user when he evaluates a step completion. When VKA detects some actions have not been done or it detects an activity carried out in an inadequate way, it presents again the step highlighting the missing actions and proposes how addressing. Using the whole kitchen, the objects contained in it and the user actions as one user interface, VKA can also provides cues to help the person to find ingredients or utensils necessary for recipe preparation. Community services and group assistance for meal preparation. VCK includes community services to foster social interactions, self-esteem and breaking isolation. In particular, a grand chef will give periodically cooking lessons and people will have the opportunity for grouping and attending at distance to the remote recipe preparation. Each person will be in her kitchen and will prepare the meal with the chef. The chef will be supported by medical and technical staff and he will be remotely able to supervise and to help, directing acting on the remote kitchen. At the end of the activity everyone will eat the meal in his kitchen linked to other participants of the collaborative recipe by the mean of the VCK. Scenario. A cooking lesson will be done in three main phases. The first phase focuses on the activities related of one's participation to the course: registration to the course, management of agenda, recipe selection, buying ingredients, etc. The second phase targets meal preparation per se: gathering ingredients, preparing, cutting, slicing, baking, sharing comments, providing pieces of advice, synchronizing everyone actions and activities, etc. The last phase corresponds to eating together at distance, sharing impression, ambiance and seeing each other. Such a scenario is fully suitable on the needs of any person, cognitive impaired or not because they are solutions for ADLs in a human society there people has a great number of things to remember and often they forget actions (i.e. buy one ingredient for cooking the dinner, find one utensil in the kitchen) that sometime could be dangerous (i.e. forget the oven on). Conclusions. The features of VCK vision makes it an AAL long-term project involving numerous and heterogeneous research fields ranging from industrial design, ergonomics, psychology, human-computer interaction and sensor networks to AAC, remote monitoring, semantics and task analysis. At the moment, the studies have produced Archipel , a robust pervasive cognitive assistant tested with people affected by mental retardation. It will be the core of the VKA. Other several on-going works included in VCK are focused on identifying user interaction as intuitive as possible hiding the complexity of the supporting technologies, on modelling the mental cognition and perception and on integrate medical appliances on the home sensor network. VCK studies and works are driven by the awareness it can find concrete solutions to help the growing number of people affected by CD, it can reduce the social-economical impact and enhance their autonomous daily living. Just to give some numbers: on 2040 only the people affected by AD are estimated on 81 million while the economic costs to United States society associated to autism, AD, schizophrenia and mental retardation on 2006 has been quantified on $250 billion