Semi-autonomous Conversational Robot to Deal with Problematic Behaviors from People with Dementia

Conversing with an older adult who suffers from dementia is challenging. There are frequent disruptions due to loss of attention, errors in interpretation, and low motivation from the person with dementia. We aim to develop a conversational robot that could assist people with dementia and their caregivers address problematic behaviors such as anxiety and depression. As an initial step in this direction we have designed a semiautonomous conversational agent. The agent is capable of participating in simple conversations with the coordination of a human operator to be perceived as an engaging speaker. We present the requirements of the semiautonomous conversational robot, and describe Eva, a prototype implemented to address these requirements. An evaluation conducted with eight caregivers of people with dementia show that the robot was perceived as an autonomous agent that could engage in a long conversation with fluidity.