Conversational system encouraging communication of the aged by method of reminiscence and quantification of active participation

Abstract

We developed a conversational system encouraging aged persons to have conversations. This system quantifies the degree of active participation (DAP) by analyzing attitudes of the users, and selects topic based on it. The DAP was revealed to be quantified with vertical movement of face per question for each topic. As a result of experiments, the system succeeded in keeping or raising the DAP in 75% (9 out of 12) of topic selection cases. In addition, the method of reminiscence was proposed and applied to the system. The method proved to be effective in encouraging conversations of the aged persons. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.