Kate Tsui presented at the 2nd Quality of Life Technology Symposium on Monday, June 28, 2010. The symposium was collocated with the annual RESNA (Rehabilitation Engineering Society of North America) conference. Her talk, titled "Prompting Devices: The State of the Practice, the State of the Art, and the future," presented a wish list of features for the next generation prompters including activity recognition, reasoning for if a task can successfully be completed given the current action, automatically providing the minimal appropriate level of prompting for both the long term and short term for a particular user, and ease of use by both the end user and the administrator.

Paper Abstract:

People with mild to medium cognitive impairments may have difficulty with remembering when to perform an activity of daily living (ADL). For people with more severe cognitive impairments, it can be difficult to learn and/or recall the sequence of steps needed to complete a task. In this paper, we present a survey of devices that provide step-by-step detail of ADL tasks with picture, text, audio, video, and/or vibration prompts. We provide a description of each device’s overall capabilities, an analysis of contextual awareness and automatic plan adaptation, and end-user evaluation.