Generating personalized dialogue towards daily counseling system for home dementia care

Abstract

The dementia counseling is a dementia care that cures physiologically unstable situation of a person with dementia, through receptive and attentive conversations. A person with dementia should receive the counseling as often as possible. However, it is difficult for a limited number of caregivers to spare sufficient time and effort. This motivated us to exploit the virtual agent technology we are developing, for implementing daily dementia counseling system at home. However, our previous system relies on static dialogue scripts. Therefore, it is difficult to realize personcentered conversations that are essential to the dementia counseling. In this paper, we propose a method that dynamically generates personalized dialogues for individual people with dementia. The proposed method extensively uses life history and linked open data (LOD). More specifically, we obtain the life history of a user based on The Center Method, then the system choose appropriate conversation considering the history. During the conversation, the system finds new information in LOD relevant to the response and uses it to develop further conversation. We also implement a prototype to show practical feasibility of the proposed method.