A Dialogue-Based System with Photo and Storytelling for Older Adults: Toward Daily Cognitive Training

Abstract

As the elderly population grows worldwide, living a healthy and full life as an older adult is becoming a topic of great interest. One key factor and severe challenge to maintaining quality of life in older adults is cognitive decline. Assistive robots for helping older adults have been proposed to solve issues such as social isolation and dependent living. Only a few studies have reported the positive effects of dialogue robots on cognitive function but conversation is being discussed as a promising intervention that includes various cognitive tasks. Existing dialogue robot-related studies have reported on placing dialogue robots in elderly homes and allowing them to interact with residents. However, it is difficult to reproduce these experiments since the participants’ characteristics influence experimental conditions, especially at home. Besides, most dialogue systems are not designed to set experimental conditions without on-site support. This study proposes a novel design method that uses a dialogue-based robot system for cognitive training at home. We define challenges and requirements to meet them to realize cognitive function training through daily communication. Those requirements are designed to satisfy detailed conditions such as duration of dialogue, frequency, and starting time without on-site support. Our system displays photos and gives original stories to provide contexts for dialogue that help the robot maintain a conversation for each story. Then the system schedules dialogue sessions along with the participant’s plan. The robot moderates the user to ask a question and then responds to the question by changing its facial expression. This question-answering procedure continued for a specific duration (4 min). To verify our design method’s effectiveness and implementation, we conducted three user studies by recruiting 35 elderly participants. We performed prototype-, laboratory-, and home-based experiments. Through these experiments, we evaluated current datasets, user experience, and feasibility for home use. We report on and discuss the older adults’ attitudes toward the robot and the number of turns during dialogues. We also classify the types of utterances and identify user needs. Herein, we outline the findings of this study, outlining the system’s essential characteristics to experiment toward daily cognitive training and explain further feature requests.

A pilot voxel-based morphometry study of older adults after the PICMOR intervention program

“…However, an alternative method which has similar effects on cognitive and brain health would have special needs for practice, since some people are reluctant to meet others. Toward addressing this issue, a dialogue-based robot system for daily cognitive training without meeting other people at home has been recently developed [ 73 ]. The user of the dialogue-based robot system listens carefully to the robotic speech and asks questions based on the speech, which requires both inputs and outputs of information.…”

Scenario-based dialogue system based on pause detection toward daily health monitoring

“…As another project of a dialogue robot system, we are developing a speech recognition-based dialogue system. 42 We are considering integrating the speech recognition-based system into our scenario-based dialogue system to deal with the specific situation which needs to use speech recognition to realize the appropriate robot’s voice-call to the older user.…”

“…The robot we used this study was BONO-06 ( Figure 3 , 41 , 42 ) and the robot was displayed on the screen of the PC/tablet of a user. The voice of the robot is synthesized in advance and played back at the timing of the speaker change.…”

Home-Based Cognitive Intervention for Healthy Older Adults Through Asking Robots Questions: Randomized Controlled Trial

“…Participants received 2-3 intervention sessions weekly; we arranged the schedules with participants individually to complete 12 dialogue sessions. The theme of each session was based on our previous studies [ 17 26 ]. The training and intervention procedure is described as follows: before the experiment, all the experimental devices were mailed to each participant.…”