Can You Keep a Secret? Exploring AI for Care Coordination in Cognitive Decline
This addresses the challenge of supporting informal caregivers and older adults with cognitive decline, but it is incremental as it focuses on exploring existing strategies rather than introducing new technological solutions.
The study explored how AI agents could assist lower-SES older adults with cognitive decline in aging-in-place by analyzing care coordination strategies, such as piggybacking, to potentially extend home stays without increasing caregiver burden.
The increasing number of older adults who experience cognitive decline places a burden on informal caregivers, whose support with tasks of daily living determines whether older adults can remain in their homes. To explore how agents might help lower-SES older adults to age-in-place, we interviewed ten pairs of older adults experiencing cognitive decline and their informal caregivers. We explored how they coordinate care, manage burdens, and sustain autonomy and privacy. Older adults exercised control by delegating tasks to specific caregivers, keeping information about all the care they received from their adult children. Many abandoned some tasks of daily living, lowering their quality of life to ease caregiver burden. One effective strategy, piggybacking, uses spontaneous overlaps in errands to get more work done with less caregiver effort. This raises the questions: (i) Can agents help with piggyback coordination? (ii) Would it keep older adults in their homes longer, while not increasing caregiver burden?