224. Smart home interactive environment design for older adults with cognitive impairments and quality of life enhancement

Abstract Background With the intensification of global aging, the number of elderly patients with cognitive impairment is surging, facing a double challenge of home safety hazards and declining quality of life. Existing smart home systems mostly focus on universal design, lacking personalized interaction logic and cognitive compensation mechanisms tailored for people with cognitive impairment. To enhance the home safety and quality of life of elderly patients with cognitive impairment, this study explores the effectiveness of multimodal interaction and cognitive assistance functions in improving their quality of life, and designs an intelligent home interaction environment. Methods The study adopted a mixed research method and recruited 60 patients with mild to moderate cognitive impairment. They were randomly divided into an experimental group (30 people) and a control group (30 people). The control group received routine care, while the experimental group received intervention through an intelligent home interactive environment. Among them, the intelligent environment conducts demand analysis through literature analysis and focus group interviews, and constructs a functional framework for intelligent home interaction environment based on the skills rules knowledge behavior model. The experimental period is 6 months, with physiological indicators and behavioral data recorded weekly. The study collected data using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL), and Self Rating Security Questionnaire, and conducted repeated measures ANOVA using SPSS 26.0. Results The comparison of key indicators between the experimental group and the control group before and after intervention is shown in Table 1. As shown in Table 1, after intervention, the total score of MoCA in the experimental group increased by 10.1%, and the total score of IADL increased by 17.8%, significantly better than the control group (p<.01); And its fall incidents were reduced by 75%, and the efficiency of cooking tasks was improved by 20.3%; Their loneliness score decreased by 33.8%. This indicates that multimodal interaction can significantly reduce operational cognitive load, and the color labeling and spatial simplification in its environment can reduce task error rates. Discussion The intelligent home interactive environment significantly improves the quality of life of patients with cognitive impairments through a triple mechanism of cognitive compensation, behavioral reinforcement, and emotional support. Its fall detection system, which integrates radar and thermal imaging, can also achieve rapid warning and enhance patients' trust in the environment. In the future, interdisciplinary methods can be further combined to optimize the system and explore cultural adaptability design to achieve universal aging adaptation.