Increasing workplace independence for people with cognitive disabilities by leveraging distributed cognition among caregivers and clients

In this paper we describe a current group configuration that is used to support people with cognitive disabilities (hereinafter referred to as "clients") in the workplace. A client receiving face-to-face, often one-to-one assistance from a dedicated human job coach is characteristic of this "traditional" model. We compare this traditional model with other group configurations that are used in cooperative and distributed work practices. In so doing, we highlight requirements that are unique to task support for people with cognitive disabilities. A survey of technologies that have been developed to provide clients with greater levels of independence is then presented. These endeavors often attempt to replace human job coaches with computational cognitive aids. We discuss some limitations of such approaches and then present a model and prototype that extends the computational job coach by incorporating human caregivers in a distributed one-to-many support system.