The Digital Cooking Coach: Using Visual and Auditory In-situ Instructions to Assist Cognitively Impaired During Cooking

Abstract

To date, approximately 20% of the world population lives with a level of cognitive impairment. In Western Europe, sheltered living facilities have emerged which collaboratively convey and train daily living skills for people with cognitive disabilities. This includes cooking as an important communal activity. However, tenants receive rudimentary cooking training since most facilities are affected by a worker shortage as they are driven on a voluntary basis. In this work, we investigate how digital in-situ assistance can be used to convey cooking instructions in kitchens. We conduct a user study (N=10) over two weeks in a sheltered living facility to evaluate the cooking performance and subjective perception between in-situ assistance and caretaker assistance. We find that caretaker assistance requires less time to prepare a meal when participants cooked previously with in-situ assistance. Our results are complemented by positive feedback of using in-situ instructions. We discuss how in-situ assistance enables independent cooking sessions in living environments for cognitively impaired.