Pet-robots vs Humanoid-robots
EXPLORING THE IMPLEMENTATION OF CONVERSATIONAL AGENTS FOR PEOPLE WITH DEMENTIA
The current generation of people with dementia has a distrust of modern technology and does not know how to operate it. Besides that, they have a limited understanding of what technology is out there and what it can do for them. For that reason, a co-design session was organized to introduce people with dementia to robots currently used in healthcare and other popular conversational agents like Google Home and Alexa. The co-design also functioned to figure out what people with dementia want from these technologies specifically focused on conversational agents. To make it easier to introduce people with dementia to the topic the comparison was made to talking to animals and objects. While talking toward animals was usually accepted, talking toward objects was perceived as embarrassing. As for what people want from these technologies is something to be able to rant to. With this information, two listening devices were made using Alexa. A human version that makes sounds like “ja, ah, ok” when talked to and a cat version that meows. Both versions were afterwards tested on people with dementia, who overall responded positively, but saw it as something that would be mainly used by lonely people. Furthermore, how they interacted with the devices differed greatly depending on the version, but shows that people with dementia are willing to go into more difficult topics like the symptoms they experience.
Info:
Project: Final Master Project (M2.2)
Year: 2023
Duration: 1 Semester
Coach: Minha Lee
Credits: Yvon Ruitenburg
During this project I build on top of my previous experiences by continuing with conversational agents with the people with dementia target group, which is already an challange on his own. To work with people with dementia I have to go out of my comfort zone and even more so when doing co-design with them. Doing this co-design was another challange as a had not used this before as a method. Co-design was used here to both generate and evaluate ideas and the prototype. To analyse the data like with the conversational agent on the skills from the previous semester by again transcribing large amount of qualitative data, going trough it in a group and later using thematic analysis to organize it. On a more technical aspect I have learned more about java-script since I needed to apply this to get the chatbot working, and make custom commands. The coding for the Amazon developer tool can be found on Github.
