Intelligent assistive robots can enhance the quality of life of people with dementia and their caregivers. They can increase the independence of older adults, reduce tensions between a person with dementia and their caregiver, and increase social engagement. This article provides a review of assistive robots designed for and evaluated by persons with dementia. Assistive robots that only increased mobility or brain-computer interfaces were excluded. Google Scholar, IEEE Digital Library, PubMed, and ACM Digital Library were searched. A final set of 53 articles covering research in 16 different countries are reviewed. Assistive robots are categorized into five different applications and evaluated for their effectiveness, as well as the robots’ social and emotional capabilities. Our findings show that robots used in the context of therapy or for increasing engagement received the most attention in the literature, whereas the robots that assist by providing health guidance or help with an activity of daily living received relatively limited attention. PARO was the most commonly used robot in dementia care studies. The effectiveness of each assistive robot and the outcome of the studies are discussed, and particularly, the social/emotional capabilities of each assistive robot are summarized. Gaps in the research literature are identified and we provide directions for future work.

Computational models of distributional semantics represent word meanings in terms of words' relationships with all other words in a corpus. Although distributional models are sensitive to topic (e.g., tiger and stripes) and synonymy (e.g., soar and fly), the models have limited sensitivity to part-of-speech (e.g., book and shirt are nouns). How lexical-syntactic knowledge is encoded and how it meshes with semantic representations are open questions. Word co-occurrence relationships define a connected graph such that any two words have some degree of separation on the graph. Models of distributional semantics are typically sensitive to only one or two degrees of separation. By recursively adding higher levels of representations to a computational, holographic model of semantic memory, we build a model sensitive to arbitrary degrees of separation. We find that word associations at four degrees of separation increase the similarity between words that share part-of-speech or syntactic type and improve the ability of the model to construct grammatical sentences. Our model provides evidence that human memory must be sensitive to indirect associations to accommodate lexical syntactic relationships as well as evidence that semantics and syntax exist on a continuum that emerges from a unitary cognitive system.

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Introduction In this paper, we study the support needed by professional caregivers of those with dementia, and present a first step toward development of VIPCare, a novel application with the goal of assisting new caregivers at care-centres in interacting with residents with dementia. Methods A mixed-methods study including two questionnaires, two focus groups, and seven co-design sessions with 17 professional caregivers was conducted to (a) understand caregivers’ challenges/approaches used to reduce negative interactions with persons with dementia, (b) identify the existing gaps in supporting information for improving such interactions, and (c) co-design the user interface of an application that aims to help improve interactions between a new professional caregiver and persons with dementia. A pre-questionnaire assessed knowledge of smartphones and attitude toward technology. A post-questionnaire provided an initial evaluation of the designed user interface. Results Focus groups emphasized the importance of role-playing learned through trial and error. The layout/content of the application was then designed in four iterative paper-prototyping sessions with professional caregivers. An iOS/Android-based application was developed accordingly and was modified/improved in three iterative sessions. The initial results supported efficiency of VIPCare and suggested a low task load index. Conclusions We presented a first step toward understanding caregiver needs and developing an application that can help reduce negative interactions between professional caregivers and those with dementia.

Computational models of distributional semantics (a.k.a. word embeddings) represent a word's meaning in terms of its relationships with all other words. We examine what grammatical information is encoded in distributional models and investigate the role of indirect associations. Distributional models are sensitive to associations between words at one degree of separation, such as 'tiger' and 'stripes', or two degrees of separation, such as 'soar' and 'fly'. By recursively adding higher levels of representations to a computational, holographic model of semantic memory, we construct a distributional model sensitive to associations between words at arbitrary degrees of separation. We find that word associations at four degrees of separation increase the similarity assigned by the model to English words that share part-of-speech or syntactic type. Word associations at four degrees of separation also improve the ability of the model to construct grammatical English sentences. Our model proposes that human memory uses indirect associations to learn part-of-speech and that the basic associative mechanisms of memory and learning support knowledge of both semantics and grammatical structure.

Decisions on when to act are critical in many health care, safety and security situations, where acting too early or too late can both lead to huge costs or losses. In this paper, impatience is investigated as a bias affecting timing decisions, and is successfully manipulated and moderated. Experiment 1 (N = 123) shows that in different tasks with the same duration, participants perform better when acting early is advantageous, as compared to when acting late is. Experiment 2 (N = 701) manipulates impatience and shows that impatience induced by delays (a) affects timing decisions in the subsequent tasks, (b) increases a tendency to receive information faster, only for a few seconds, with cost and no gain, and (c) reduces satisfaction in the subsequent task. Furthermore, impatience is significantly moderated by showing fast countdowns during the delays. Experiment 3 (N = 304) shows that the mechanism behind this impatience moderation is altered time perception and presents trade-offs between duration perception and duration recall.

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