A Method for Producing Reminiscence Videos by Using Photo Annotations-Application and Evaluation for Dementia Sufferers-

Abstract

Providing good home-based care to people with dementia is becoming an important issue as the size of the elderly population increases. One of the main problems in providing such care is that it must be constantly provided without interruption, and this puts a great burden on caregivers, who are often family members. Networked Interaction Therapy is the name we call our methods designed to relieve the stress of people suffering from dementia as well as that of their family members. This therapy aims to provide a system that interacts with people with dementia by utilizing various engaging stimuli. One such stimulus is a reminiscence video created from old photo albums, which is a promising way to hold a dementia sufferer's attention for a long time. In this paper, we present an authoring tool to assist in the production of a reminiscence video by using photo annotations. We conducted interviews with several video creators on how they used photo annotations such as date, title and subject of photos when they produced the reminiscence videos. According to the creators' comments, we have defined an ontology for representing the creators' knowledge of how to add visual effects to a reminiscence video. Subsequently, we developed an authoring tool that automatically produces a reminiscence video from the annotated photos. Subjective evaluation of the quality of reminiscence videos produced with our tool indicates that they give impressions similar to those produced by creators using conventional video editing software. The effectiveness of presenting such a video to people with dementia is also discussed. keywords: photo annotation, meta data, semantic web, ontology, reminiscence video, dementia, care at home. © 2005, The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.