Using Temporal Constraint Reasoning to Improve Self-Management Decision Making

As adolescents with disabilities like spinal cord dysfunction transition to adulthood, they must take responsibility for managing their daily lives including the complications that their conditions impose. Lacking experience in anticipating, recognizing, and overcoming life obstacles for themselves, they can sometimes withdraw from enriching experiences rather than risk finding themselves in uncomfortable, and even unhealthful, situations. In a project to begin next summer, we will investigate how AI technologies can help them better understand how alternative decisions may affect downstream outcomes and options, so as to be able to engage with more confidence in wider ranges of social and educational activities. This talk will describe some of the temporal constraint reasoning techniques that we have developed and plan to extend for this application.