Conversational AI Therapist for Daily Function Screening in Home Environments

Abstract

The growth of smart devices is making typical homes more intelligent. In this work, in collaboration with therapists, we introduce a home-based AI therapist that takes advantage of the smart home environment to screen the day-to-day functioning and infer mental wellness of an occupant. Unlike existing "chatbot"works that identify the mental status of users through conversation, our AI therapist additionally leverages smart devices and sensors throughout the home to infer mental well-being and assesses a user's daily functioning. We propose a series of 37 dimensions of daily functioning, that our system observes through conversing with the user and detecting daily activity events using sensors and smart sensors throughout the home. Our system utilizes these 37 dimensions in conjunction with novel natural language processing architectures to detect abnormalities in mental status (e.g., angry or depressed), well-being, and daily functioning and generate responses to console users when abnormalities are detected. Through a series of user studies, we demonstrate that our system can converse with a user naturally, accurately detect abnormalities in well-being, and provide appropriate responses consoling users.