Designing an Elderly Virtual Caregiver Using Dialogue Agents and WebRTC

Abstract

An aging society has gradually become a worldwide topic. To assist elderly people in daily dialogue and aid memory, a virtual caregiver with dialogue agents has been actively developed. In most virtual caregivers, limitations of system environments or devices exist. Share-ability for elderly people who are so far apart also requires improvement urgently. The purpose of this paper is to design a novel architecture of an elderly virtual caregiver. Our key idea is to regard the online chat room as a virtual house for elderly people, integrating dialogue agents and Web real-time communication (WebRTC). In the proposed architecture, we first extend its useable places and devices by sharing its interface to an online chat room. Then, we regard the action of calling a partner to chat as one of the dialogue scenarios by integrating dialogue agents and WebRTC.

Assisting Personalized Healthcare of Elderly People: Developing a Rule-Based Virtual Caregiver System Using Mobile Chatbot

“…Then, the person externalizes his/her mind as words by answering the question. Finally, the externalized data are stored as internal states, and utilized for appropriate supports or carers [ 31 , 32 , 35 ].…”

“…using various sensors [ 27 , 28 ], we principally focus on the inner expressions (i.e., thinking and feeling) of elderly people. In previous studies, to realize a smooth care nursing intervention, a speech-based interaction between virtual agents (i.e., MMDAgent [ 29 ]) and elderly people on a general computer has been proposed [ 30 , 31 , 32 ], such as confirming the daily state [ 33 ], answering the counseling [ 34 , 35 , 36 ], and extending to micro service such as watching favorite videos [ 37 , 38 ]. Our key concept is to regard a virtual agent as a caregiver, called a virtual caregiver [ 39 ].…”

Integrating multiple dialogue agents using WebRTC for facilitating elderly mutual-aid at home

“…(S5) Chat Room Management Service: Monitoring the activity status (i.e., call free, on a call, or offline) of every agent-ID. Results and Discussion As preliminary studies, we presented our latest technologies for designing an elderly virtual caregiver (Chen et al, 2021) and the microservice execution framework (Ozono et al, 2021). We are currently implementing the agent-based communication system and planning to conduct an experimental evaluation with multiple elderly subjects from viewpoints of operability and acceptability.…”