Reminiscence therapy is a non-pharmacological intervention that helps mitigate unstable psychological and emotional states in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, where past experiences are evoked through conversations between the patients and their caregivers, stimulating autobiographical episodic memory. It is highly recommended that people with Alzheimer regularly receive this type of therapy. In this paper, we describe the development of a conversational system that can be used as a tool to provide reminiscence therapy to people with Alzheimer’s disease. The system has the ability to personalize the therapy according to the patients information related to their preferences, life history and lifestyle. An evaluation conducted with eleven people related to patient care (caregiver = 9, geriatric doctor = 1, care center assistant = 1) shows that the system is capable of carrying out a reminiscence therapy according to the patient information in a successful manner.

Reminiscence therapy is a treatment of dementia that mitigates the unstable psychological states of a person with dementia, through conversations between patient and caregiver that evoke past experiences focusing on the patient's long-term memory. It is recommended that a person with dementia receive this type of therapy constantly. In this work, we propose the design of a dialog model that generates personalized conversations between a conversational system and patients with Alzheimer's disease, with the aim to assist their caregivers in providing this type of therapy. The proposed model will be capable of getting a semantic interpretation about what the user is saying, identifying the type of dialog, also it will use information from the patient's life history and lifestyle to generate the conversations. During the dialog between the system and the patient, the model searches for relevant information related to the patient's history through the use of ontologies to enrich and develop a further conversation.