The Florence Project

The Florence Project

AI is revolutionizing health and communication technologies with promise to support people living with dementia in the community. However, current systems require screen-based devices such as smart phones that are often not accessible to them. The challenge for healthy ageing is to design novel AI systems that are easy to use to for people with cognitive challenges.

The Florence Project designs AI-enabled communication technology for people living with dementia at home. Novel hardware devices have been designed for simplicity and are used to interact with a person’s Life Library, which contains the information that someone living with dementia wants to record about themselves and share with their care partners, health professionals, family and friends.

The key to the Florence approach is the interdisciplinary design process which includes an expert panel of people who live with dementia or are care partners, together with interaction designers, occupational therapists, speech pathologists as well as AI experts and other technology developers. The living experience expert panel have advised on the life library system, interaction with hardware devices, and tutoring the knowledge base. The result is a calm computing environment with cyber security inbuilt, where technology supports people’s daily lives.

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  • Organization
    University of Queensland
  • Profession
    Communication technology for people living with dementia