Abductive Cognitive Support for (Semantic) Dementia Persons

Previously, I introduced the concept of affordance to support dementia persons. Limited merits of affordance for supporting dementia persons are pointed out by Bozeat and Hodges. In addition, after the extension of Gibson’s concept of affordance, it is mainly applied to the interface design. Based on the concept of affordance by Gibson, I proposed a dementia person support mechanism in which functions or meanings of things can be suggested. It is based on abduction framework and performed under the context of chance discovery to determine affordance. That is, the suggestion is not offered explicitly. I showed my assumption that complex situation can be transformed to a combination of simple situations and necessity of develop a mechanism to transform complex situation to a combination of simple situations. In addition I discussed it as curation in chance discovery. Thus the framework can be realized by the introduction of shikake’s concept. A shikake is a trigger to start a certain action or to change person’s mind and behaviour. As a result of the action, all or part of problem will be solved. It sometimes is not the person’s will. In this paper, I will discuss the support of dementia persons as an installation of shikake in the environment. By the installation of shikake dementia persons can be implicitly guided to behave properly. It can be regarded as a proper selection of affordance by a proper curation. I will also discuss this type of issue from the viewpoint of the first-person research and information design.