Entertainment Chatbot for the Digital Inclusion of Elderly People Without Abstraction Capabilities

Abstract

This work was supported by MINECO grant TEC 2016-76465-C2-2-R and Xunta de Galicia grant GRC 2018/053, Spain. The authors are indebted to Asociación de Familiares de enfermos de Alzheimer y otras demencias de Galicia (AFAGA) for providing us with gerontology expertise and valuable design recommendations.

Evaluation of Abstraction Capabilities and Detection of Discomfort with a Newscaster Chatbot for Entertaining Elderly Users

“…First, a generative NLG model is used to create short human-like dialogues about the news content presented to the end users. Second, SA is applied to gather the polarity of the user utterances (we employ the supervised algorithm in [4] based on a dataset that was annotated manually). This introduces empathy to foster user engagement and allows annotating contextual data.…”

“…This introduces empathy to foster user engagement and allows annotating contextual data. In the following subsections we detail the building blocks, some of which are improved versions of those in [4]. All design decisions were consulted with gerontology experts and end users of AFAGA.…”

“…Elderly people spend much of their leisure time with traditional media, such as radio and television broadcasts, often as "background voices" [4,7]. It has been shown that this alleviates their solitude [8].…”

“…Despite the many technological advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR), still more work must be conducted to achieve a practical caregiver chatbot for end users [3]. Instead of pursuing that long-term goal, we have proposed a feasible, realistic approach to an intelligent conversational assistant with video and audio sensors that controls a newscaster, which seeks both to entertain elderly users and augment their abstraction skills [4].…”

“…However, the technological background they demand [6] is excessive for the elders, who are not interested in these devices as mere toys. They prefer familiar media, such as television or radio broadcasts [4,7]. Accordingly, we seek to augment this type of media with assistant chatbots for enabling intelligent newscasters.…”