Towards Assessing the Communication Responsiveness of People with Dementia

Abstract

The number of elderly people is increasing. Some of them live alone, need physical help, and more seriously have cognitive impairment such as Dementia symptoms. To help such people, assistive technologies need to be developed. Pollak [2] proposed three assistive functions for elderly people with cognitive impairment, and assessing the elder’s cognitive status is one of the issues she proposed. If the agent system can assess the patient’s cognitive status through conversations, that will be a more natural way of measuring the cognitive status of the patient. Moreover, interpersonal communication is one of the most preferable daily activities for elderly people. As the first step towards assessment technologies, we developed a prototype of a listener agent, and collected conversations between the agent and people with Dementia. This paper reports the results of analyzing collected data for speech and head motion.