Reverse Engineering Dementia With Human Computer Interaction

With many millions of Americans suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia, cognitive decline is a major issue. The cost of dementia care is a rude awakening for many families, and patients experiencing the troubling symptoms of these difficulties might despair when they hear that there’s really no “cure,” just treatment.

One of the problems is that dementia can look a lot like other forms of cognitive decline, like milder senility. So part of the process is diagnosis.

We may not be able to cure dementia. But we can at least get help figuring out how to diagnose it with tools based on something called HCI.

What is HCI? It stands for ‘human-computer interaction’. In some ways, it’s pretty much what it sounds like – the study of users and their behaviors in using computers. But it’s also a form of cognitive engineering, and may give us a window into the human mind.

The Interaction Design Foundation offers some context:

“The challenge of personal computing became manifest at an opportune time. The broad project of cognitive science, which incorporated cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and the philosophy of mind, had formed at the end of the 1970s. Part of the program of cognitive science was to articulate systematic and scientifically informed applications to be known as ‘cognitive engineering’. Thus, at just the point when personal computing presented the practical need for HCI, cognitive science presented people, concepts, skills, and a vision for addressing such needs through an ambitious synthesis of science and engineering. HCI was one of the first examples of cognitive engineering.”

The same writer shows us the expansion of the concept, and how diverse HCI is:

“Although the original academic home for HCI was computer science, and its original focus was on personal productivity applications, mainly text editing and spreadsheets, the field has constantly diversified and outgrown all boundaries. It quickly expanded to encompass visualization, information systems, collaborative systems, the system development process, and many areas of design. HCI is taught now in many departments/faculties that address information technology, including psychology, design, communication studies, cognitive science, information science, science and technology studies, geographical sciences, management information systems, and industrial, manufacturing, and systems engineering. HCI research and practice draws upon and integrates all of these perspectives.”

With that stage set, let’s talk about what some MIT people (and others) are doing to advance some of the science around dementia diagnosis and similar tasks.

First, they’re looking at something called “inadvertent interaction” which some argue will give us more robust views of someone’s cognitive health.

Looking at stylus-based interaction tasks, scientists are pondering quite a few metrics that reveal details on what people are thinking: eye fixation, blink rate, pupil size, etc.

That in turn can help with the epidemic of cognitive impairment as we age (as presented by Randall Davis in this presentation. Davis also showed us some of the new technology coming down the pike).

Why is this exciting? Well, if diagnosis is our main strategy, and we can care for people better by finding early cognitive decline, then some of this new technique is going to be valuable, along with things like stem cell research, for instance.

It’s also fascinating, to me, to think about applications beyond dementia research, because observing things like prosody, body language and gestures can bring us all kinds of other deep intelligence on the human condition as a whole – something that classic writers may have an opinion on!

Think about the potential of models that study inadvertent interactions, and how that might manifest in the AI community.