I am looking for good options for an elderly relative which has some onset of slight dementia, but is still living alone (with assistance).

The main problem is that usual things are becoming just too complicated for that person. There are too many details that don’t matter. For example, user interfaces have a lot of features that are not strictly needed, many hidden states, often no clearly visible affordances, and so on. Some mail clients make it difficult to recognize phishing.

As a good example how it is done better, I’d name GNOME simple-scan. A really good and simple UI!

This person is currently using Thunderbird + Firefox on Windows, and K9 Mail on Android. Learned to use Windows in their sixties and is now in mid-eighties age.

The main need is a simpler Email client.

Any suggestions?

  • makeshift0546@lemmy.today
    10·
    1 day ago

    Y’all will get pissy. You should set them up with an AI assistant interface. You could do it with a powerful GPU + qwen, but there are obviously non foss options as well.

    Set up something like Hermes + Nemoclaw. Set them up with productivity skills they’ll need, eg let’s go through my email. As well as skills, memories, and cron tasks to help them through the day. Set them up with agents to automatically review for scams and other malicious payloads and flag you. Skills to contact you to intervene when situations with low confidence arise.

    The medical models for this are currently being developed, but the public ones are good enough for now.

    Yes, it’ll hallucinate, but I promise you it’ll still be better at identifying scams than your family member. For me the biggest concern with be them creating an attachment to the AI which is certainly problematic but I’d weigh the risks and where they come from as age increases and dementia gets worse but for me the rest of the risk mitigation would be worth it.

    • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      I’d recommend against having someone with cognitive health issues offload cognitive load to a machine that has demonstrated many times to be poor at it.

      You’ve brought up the dangers of hallucinations and dependence, but I think the dangers are much riskier than you think they are.

      Besides, doesn’t learning and using critical thought help slow down the progress of dementia?

      • sudoer777@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        15 hours ago

        I’d recommend against having someone with cognitive health issues offload cognitive load to a machine that has demonstrated many times to be poor at it.

        AI has improved tremendously though and outperforms old people with cognitive health issues by a large margin at this point, and that’s even with low-cost models

      • makeshift0546@lemmy.today
        3·
        20 hours ago

        I assure you the dangers of falling for a scam and sending your retirement to a scammer is more consequential. You can instruct models to drop the nice act via skills and memories with rbac to mitigate. It’s a tool to handle certain things and risk mitigate.

        Not every LLM is candyai trying to date you. It’s putting your emails in front of you and running scam detection and maybe paying a bill or two.

        • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
          2·
          16 hours ago

          Google, Microsoft, banks and everyone in between has been spending the last decade rolling out sophisticated scam detection systems and infrastructure. If a scam can get through all that, then it can get through your little kiddy model.

          And even if you did have a model that worked well, why is the best interface for it an llm? Why not just have a big red “scam warning” banner? Loud, clear and to the point.

          AI agents can make mistakes, that’s something you’re going to have to explain to the user. But you also have to explain to the user to always listen to the scam warning even if their gut thinks otherwise. How do you define whether or not you should trust the AI in such a way that someone with cognitive impairment can apply it?

          • sudoer777@lemmy.mlEnglish
            3·
            14 hours ago

            If a scam can get through all that, then it can get through your little kiddy model.

            I use FastMail which has a reputation for decent spam filtering, and spam messages still fall through. I also have AI agents process my emails and it correctly detects those messages as spam.

            why is the best interface for it an llm?

            Because you can talk to it like a person and it’s not bounded by a GUI’s features. Compared to humans they’re more readily available and you’re not risking your relationship if you need to ask something you wouldn’t want to ask a person

            Why not just have a big red “scam warning” banner?

            Because we already have those and they aren’t reliable enough

            How do you define whether or not you should trust the AI in such a way that someone with cognitive impairment can apply it?

            When in doubt ask a human when one becomes available

  • Takapapatapaka@tarte.nuage-libre.frFrançais
    5·
    1 day ago

    Well as you pointed out the GNOME philosophy of keeping everything dead simple can be interesting there. Their mail client apps are Evolution and Geary, the last one seeming to be the simplest one.