Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. L.A. County gets a new tool to find and save vulnerable people with cognitive disabilities Jordan Wall, 27, of Chatsworth, -- an athlete, actor and global messenger for the Special Olympics -- wears her new GPS watch from the group L.A. Found on Oct. 15, 2025. The county program L.A. Found offers free tracking devices to residents with cognitive disabilities who are at risk of wandering away from home. Since launching seven years ago, more than 1,800 people have received devices through the program, with 29 successfully located after going missing. Janet Rivera cares for both her 79-year-old mother, who has dementia, and her 25-year-old son, who has a genetic condition called Fragile X syndrome.

This communication presents preliminary findings from comparing two recent chatbots, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard, in the context of fire engineering by evaluating their responses in handling fire safety related queries. A diverse range of fire engineering questions and scenarios were created and examined, including structural fire design, fire prevention strategies, evacuation, building code compliance, and fire suppression systems (some of which resemble those commonly present in the Fire Protection exam (FPE)). The results reveal some key differences in the performance of the chatbots, with ChatGPT demonstrating a relatively superior performance. Then, this communication highlights the potential for chatbot technology to revolutionize fire engineering practices by providing instant access to critical information while outlining areas for further improvement and research. Evidently, and when it matures, this technology will likely be elemental to our engineers' practice and education.

We examine ProcessGPT, an AI model designed to automate, augment, and improve business processes, to study the challenges of managing business processes within the cognitive limitations of the human workforce, particularly individuals with cognitive disabilities. ProcessGPT provides a blueprint for designing efficient business processes that take into account human cognitive limitations. By viewing this through the lens of cognitive disabilities, we show that ProcessGPT improves process usability for individuals with and without cognitive disabilities. We also demonstrate that organizations implementing ProcessGPT-like capabilities will realize increased productivity, morale, and inclusion.

With Global Accessibility Awareness Day just days away, Apple is previewing a raft of new iOS features for cognitive accessibility, along with Live Speech, Personal Voice and more. The company said it worked in "deep collaboration" with community groups representing users with disabilities, and drew on "advances in hardware and software, including on-device machine learning" to make them work. The biggest update is "Assistive Access" designed to support users with cognitive disabilities. Essentially, it provides a custom, simplified experience for the phone, FaceTime, Messages, Camera, Photos, and Music apps. That includes a "distinct interface with high contrast buttons and large text labels" along with tools that can be customized by trusted supporters for each individual.

More than 1.3 million Californians may be drinking high levels of manganese, enough to cause cognitive disabilities in children and Parkinson's-like symptoms in adults. The discovery was made by researchers at the University of California - Riverside (UCR), who discovered the mineral is thriving in untreated wells throughout Central Valley. The study found private wells and public water systems, with nearly half of the affected residents living in disadvantaged communities - almost 89 percent are likely to access water highly contaminated with manganese. While manganese is found in water supplies worldwide, the US is one of the only nations not enforcing a maximum level. The research comes as the University of Los Angeles may have uncovered a link between lithium in drinking water and autism.

Text Simplification (TS) is the task of converting a text into a form that is easier to read while maintaining the meaning of the original text. A sub-task of TS is Cognitive Simplification (CS), converting text to a form that is readily understood by people with cognitive disabilities without rendering it childish or simplistic. This sub-task has yet to be explored with neural methods in NLP, and resources for it are scarcely available. In this paper, we present a method for incorporating knowledge from the cognitive accessibility domain into a TS model, by introducing an inductive bias regarding what simplification operations to use. We show that by adding this inductive bias to a TS-trained model, it is able to adapt better to CS without ever seeing CS data, and outperform a baseline model on a traditional TS benchmark. In addition, we provide a novel test dataset for CS, and analyze the differences between CS corpora and existing TS corpora, in terms of how simplification operations are applied.

Brian Villani, 26, tall and in khakis, extroverted, both opinionated and earnest, shares a garden-level apartment with two roommates in greater Boston that's outfitted with the material culture of young adulthood: big overstuffed couch, multiple gaming systems, oversize posters, a clutter of plastic kitchenware. He commutes by train to a job he's held for years at a corporate mail room downtown, a job he loves--"I pick up all the packages, and all my vendors know me," he says. He lives close--"but not too close," he says wryly--to his parents and has an abiding passion for sports, especially the art of play-by-play announcing. He is counting down the days to his brother's wedding. Villani moves through life, home to work and back again, with an extended set of technologies that are a mix of the familiar and distinctive.

As well as causing death and destruction, a study suggests natural disasters can put people at a greater risk of developing dementia. Using health and survey data on people living in the areas worst hit by a 2011 tsunami in Japan, experts from Harvard University explored the link between cognitive decline and natural disasters. The event, which killed 20,000 and saw 100,000 children uprooted from their homes, may also have contributed to cognitive decline in older adults, they found. More than 3,000 people with an average age of 73 were questioned about their cognitive state, finding those that lost a home in the disaster experienced an increase in their rate of cognitive decline, but losing a loved one had no impact. The team say this is linked to increased isolation, with the unmarried, lower educated and eldest at the greatest risk of increasing cognitive decline.

Besides the benefits for the community of people with cognitive disabilities, it can also become a useful educational tool in the foreign language classroom, where students with a limited knowledge of a target language can rely on it to adapt complex literary works.

Soul Machines has discussed services for the elderly with prospective clients but has not announced any partnerships on that subject to date, says chief business officer Greg Cross. Soul Machines envisions a future in which digital instructors educate students without access to quality human teachers, and in which famous deceased artists are digitally resurrected to discuss their works in museums. Robot companions for the infirm, then, are not too far a leap. Nor is the prospect of a future in which a family converses with the lively AI recreation of a person suffering from dementia, while a caregiver--robot or human--tends to their ailing body in another room. The potential for deception is already here. A few years ago, Brent Lawson, the president of 1 AM Dolls, a manufacturer of life-sized rubber sex dolls, was on the phone with a client who wanted a specific doll he'd seen on the company's website. The man was particularly concerned that the doll's hair was just so, and peppered Lawson with questions about the color and style, Lawson told Quartz.