What Happens When AI Becomes Assistive Technology?

We started screwing around with AI to see if it could help with memory and executive function after brain injury. Somewhere along the way, we made a coloring book.

One of the things I've been doing for quite a while now with Project TBI is screwing around with AI to see if it can actually be useful as an assistive technology for people with brain injuries. I don't mean asking ChatGPT questions about TBI. I mean actually using AI to compensate for some of the things I struggle with now, especially memory and executive function. I use it to capture ideas, figure out what I was doing yesterday, organize the ridiculous number of things bouncing around in my head, and sometimes just answer the question, "What the hell was I doing?"

That last one is probably more important than it sounds.

I still have plenty of ideas. That's never really been the problem. The problem is that I can get halfway into something, run out of gas, walk away from it, and when I come back I don't necessarily have the same trail of breadcrumbs that I used to have. Sometimes I remember the idea but not what I was going to do with it. Sometimes I remember working on something but can't remember where I stopped. And sometimes I find something I made three days ago and think, Oh yeah. That's actually pretty good. I forgot about that.

So we've been building around that problem.

I don't really know what to call what we're building yet. I've called it an executive assistant, an executive-function assistant, an executive-function agent and probably a few other things. None of those names quite get it. The idea is basically to have something alongside me that captures what I'm doing as I'm doing it, remembers enough of the context that I don't have to reconstruct the whole damn thing every time I come back, and helps me get restarted when my brain decides we're beginning from scratch.

And here's the part I didn't expect.

I've started creating a shitload of stuff.

Some of it is serious. We've been working on the Fluctuating Energy Economy, the Prepared Patient Paradox, the TBI Vault and a bunch of other ideas that came directly out of living with this injury and trying to understand what the hell is happening to me. But we've also been playing around with the things I do that seem to help my brain. Gardening. Building things. Exercise. Drawing. Coloring. Working with my hands. Anything that lets me focus on one thing for a while instead of trying to keep fifteen burners going at once.

That's how the tortoise showed up.

We were talking about coloring one day and how ridiculously therapeutic something that simple can be. There's no appointment. Nobody is testing you. Nobody is asking you what day it is or making you remember five words. You sit down, pick up a pencil or a crayon and color something. That's about it.

So we started making some coloring pages.

Then the pages needed a character.

Apparently the character needed to be a tortoise.

And apparently his name needed to be Tony.

I'm sure Freud would have something to say about that, but whatever.

The funny thing is, the more we worked on Tony, the more he started reflecting some of the stuff we've been talking about at Project TBI without us deliberately turning him into "the brain injury tortoise." I don't want that. He's just Tony. He plants things. He builds things. He exercises. He screws around in the garden. Sometimes he's around noise and doesn't particularly enjoy it. Sometimes he's busy. Sometimes he's resting. Sometimes he's just doing absolutely nothing important.

Which, frankly, might be one of the things I needed to relearn.

Anyway, one coloring page became another, and then another, and before I knew it we had enough of the damn things that I said, "Wait a minute. Is this a book?"

Turns out it was.

So Tony the Tortoise is now a coloring book.
https://amzn.to/3VU3XvD

I'm not writing this because everybody needs to run out and buy a Tony the Tortoise coloring book. I'll probably put some of the pages on Project TBI for free anyway. What interests me much more is how the hell we got here.

I don't think I could have followed this idea all the way through a couple of years ago. Not because I couldn't have thought of it. I probably would have thought of twenty versions of it. The problem would have been carrying one of those versions across the finish line before I lost the thread, got exhausted, got distracted by something else or decided the whole thing was stupid.

AI didn't come up with the reason Tony exists.

My screwed-up brain did.

What AI did was help me hang onto the idea long enough to do something with it.

And that has me thinking differently about what "assistive technology" actually means.

Maybe it isn't always about helping somebody remember an appointment or make a grocery list. Maybe sometimes it's simply about giving somebody enough support to keep being who they were. Or maybe even figure out who they're becoming.

We're going to keep screwing around with this executive-function thing until we figure out exactly what it is. Some of it will work. I'm sure some of it won't. We'll document both because that's really what Project TBI is supposed to be about anyway.

And every once in a while, apparently, something completely unexpected is going to fall out the other side.

This time it was a tortoise.