Implementation and evaluation of interactive memory-aid agent service for people with dementia

Abstract

In recent years, a number of reminder systems have been developed to help elderly people with dementia. However, the existing reminder systems lack the sympathetic human-machine interaction. In this paper, we propose a new reminder service which aims to assist elderly people with dementia using Human Computer Interaction technology. Proposed agent service consists of four components called Care- Module, Virtual Agent user interface (VA), ControllService and Memory Aid Client (MAClient). VA is a promising technology for people with dementia since it can assist a patient based on less-mechanical and (simulated) human-to-human conversation. CareModule is consists of functions that provides the generating the user interface and operation for the VA. The ControllService manages the state of transition and that enables to provide the loosely coupled component among the agent services. Memory-Aid Client (MAClient) visualizes reminder information in a screen, and which provides graphical user interface (e.g., button, list, etc.) to collect responses from a user. In order to evaluate the feasibility and usability of the proposed agent service, we also conduct the experiment evaluation with actual subjects. Based on the experiment evaluation, we also show the validity of proposed agent service.