Towards Conversational Agents to support Informal Caregivers of People with Dementia: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

People who have dementia (PwD) experience deteriorating executive functions, in particular their working memory, and therefore find it hard to complete multistep tasks or activities of daily living. There is no doubt that during the pandemic, PwD and their caregivers were particularly vulnerable, often isolated which affected their mental and physical health. Their ability to live independently was hampered, fomenting depression in the PwD and burnout on informal caregivers. Information technology can support dementia care improving the quality of life of PwD and easing the burden on caregivers. There is an increasing demand to support informal caregivers and improve their well-being by making dementia challenges less severe. This study uses qualitative techniques to design a model with technological strategies based on semi-structured interviews applied to seven informal caregivers from two different countries. Based on these interviews we developed design insights for implementing solutions to help informal caregivers take care of their PwD at home using conversational agents. We hope that the findings presented in this study will help researchers, and developers design solutions that can support PwD and informal caregivers.

Usability Test for Teachers in Their Training to Care for Children with Hearing Disabilities Mediated by ICT

“…User-Centered Design (UCD) is a design methodology focused on the needs of users to develop products and services by improving usability, accessibility and user experience, which translates into greater user satisfaction in the use of the product or service. According to Norman and Draper [14], the (DCU) identifies the needs, requirements and limitations of users to design products that meet those needs effectively and efficiently, to achieve this the design process must be iterative and collaborative, with the active participation of users and designers in all stages of the process, for example , conversational agents for informal caregivers , applying a descriptive phenomenological qualitative study to carry out a questionnaire of open questions for the care of people with dementia and piloted with a commercial device [15] and the automatic translate service of the Nahuatl language , on topics of inclusion when Nahuatl spoken in regions where English the dominant language . This leads native people to in some way forget their mother language in favor of Spanish.…”

Supporting dementia caregivers in Peru through chatbots: generative AI vs structured conversations.

“…Moreover, a recent study discussed the unique challenges and opportunities of conversational agents to support dementia caregivers (Jiménez, et al, 2022). The authors conducted a qualitative study with 7 participants who identified forgetting things and repetitive questioning as the most challenging behaviours of the PWD, factors that have not yet been tackled with a conversational agent.…”

“…The first phase of the study involved semi-structured interviews with dementia caregivers and experts in dementia. The purpose was to inform the design of our chatbot (Jiménez, et al, 2022). Our findings were transformed into chatbot design, system design, and conversational design requirements.…”