Easy deployment of spoken dialogue technology on smartwatches for mental healthcare

Abstract

Smartwatches are becoming increasingly sophisticated and popular as several major smartphone manufacturers, including Apple, have released their new models recently. We believe that these devices can serve as smart objects for people suffering from mental disorders such as memory loss. In this paper, we describe how to utilise smartwatches to create intelligent user interfaces that can be used to provide cognitive assistance in daily life situations of dementia patients. By using automatic speech recognisers and text-to-speech synthesis, we create a dialogue application that allows patients to interact through natural language. We compare several available libraries for Android and show an example of integrating a smartwatch application into an existing healthcare infrastructure.