Towards individualized outdoor navigation assistance for people with Alzheimer's disease

This dissertation proposal outlines a new interdisciplinary approach to developing an individualized navigation assistance system for people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The described system aims at an automatic assessment of the user’s spatial cognitive deficits imn real-tie, while adjusting the complexity and presentation of route instructions to account for the user’s residual skills and preferences. This approach provides people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease with an improved level of autonomy, while explicitly reducing the risk of creating an over-dependency on the technology. The thesis tries to make use of recent findings on the neurological background of the cognitive impairments associated with the disease and to appropriately account for individual differences in wayfinding and orientation strategies of affected individuals. It will provide a modular framework for the empirical evaluation of different means of assistance it offers.