Most Significant Contributions (last 6 years)

1. Domus Laboratory : Living Labs for Designing Assistive Technology

I am the director and the co-founder of the DOMUS laboratory. DOMUS has an extensive experience using participatory design, pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, and living labs to design, explore, and evaluate a wide range of innovative solutions for cognitive assistance aimed to foster the autonomy of people with Dementia, Alzheimer disease, mild cognitive impairments, traumatic brain injury, mental retardation, or schizophrenia. Building pervasive assistance systems is a very complex challenge that requires deep knowledge, practical experience, and sophisticated hardware. I put into place the compulsory blend of interdisciplinary expertise, a rich international network of organizations, and a unique world-class infrastructure.

2. Creation of an international research network on smart homes:

At DOMUS, >20 researchers collaborate in interdisciplinary projects. Their expertise covers both technology (computer science, engineering and geomatics) and health sciences and clinic (gerontology, occupational therapy, psychology, and neuropsychology), as well as ergonomics and design. DOMUS have collaborated with national and international research centers e.g. IATSL (Toronto), Telecom Bretagne (France), CRS4 (Italy), I2Star (Singapore) etc.), private corporations e.g. Ericsson Canada, Rogers, Orange (France), as well as health organizations and housing units (Centre of Rehabilitation – Estrie, Résidence de l'Estrie, etc.). DOMUS benefits from a rich and versatile research infrastructure to design, implement, and assess cognitive orthotics. This infrastructure integrates three variations on the living lab concept: a smart apartment on the campus enabling short term studies in technology-rich simulated housing, a living lab in an alternative housing unit for people with traumatic brain injury enabling long term ecological studies in a technology-rich real housing, and finally seniors' residences and personal residences (apartments and houses) enabling long term ecological studies in a mobile and agile technology environment.

3. Extensive training of students:

Every year, nearly 10 graduate students, 20 undergraduate students and 10 international students are trained in interdisciplinary research projects at DOMUS. International, national, and regional awards have acknowledged the quality of the research done by DOMUS researchers and students.

4. Development of clinical studies

Since 2002, >15 clinical and usability studies involving >160 participants and their caregivers have been completed, supported by >$ 3M in grants and research contracts.

5. Mobile and Pervasive Assistive Technologies

Over the past 14 years, several cognitive orthotics were designed, implemented and evaluated at DOMUS. The resulting set of orthotics can support a wide variety of activities of daily living (ADL) to foster autonomy at home for people with cognitive impairments, e.g. medication, meal preparation, or budget. For one, meal preparation is crucial for social participation and autonomy. I am deeply and closely involved in the interdisciplinary research that produced three cooking assistants: Archipel (2008), SemAssist (2010) and COOK (2015). Archipel is designed for people with mental retardation and relies on procedural assistance. SemAssist, is designed for elders with semantic memory deficits. COOK is aimed to help people with severe traumatic brain injury to cook complex meals. COOK incorporates evidence-based best practices in occupational therapy to support metacognition. To a larger extend, I am developing with my collaborators a novel formal theory of cognitive rehabilitation. Clinical studies with Archipel and SemAssist results were beyond expectations. All cognitively impaired people involved were able to prepare successfully their meals and less assistance was required. COOK is under experimentation in DOMUS living lab. Indeed almost all cognitive assistance technologies developed at DOMUS are evaluated with real users in real conditions.