Meet CARMEN, short for Cognitively Assistive Robot for Motivation and Neurorehabilitation–a small, tabletop robot designed to help people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) learn skills to improve memory, attention, and executive functioning at home. Unlike other robots in this space, CARMEN was developed by the research team at the University of California San Diego in collaboration with clinicians, people with MCI, and their care partners. To the best of the researchers' knowledge, CARMEN is also the only robot that teaches compensatory cognitive strategies to help improve memory and executive function.
"We wanted to make sure we were providing meaningful and practical inventions," said Laurel Riek, a professor of computer science and emergency medicine at UC San Diego and the work's senior author. MCI is an in-between stage between typical aging and dementia. It affects various areas of cognitive functioning, including memory, attention, and executive functioning.
About 20% of individuals over 65 have the condition, with up to 15% transitioning to dementia each year. Existing pharmacological treatments have not been able to slow or prevent this evolution, but behavioral treatments can help. Researchers programmed CARMEN to deliver a series of simple cognitive training exercises.
For example, the robot can teach participants to create routine places to leave important objects, such as keys; or learn note taking strategies to remember important things. CARMEN does this t.