Appropriate talking pattern of an information support robot for people living with dementia: a case study

Abstract

Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by emerald-srm:198285 [] For AuthorsIf you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The authors are in the process of exploring an information support robot to support daily activities of people with mild cognitive impairment or dementia. The purpose of this paper is to reveal how the robot should talk to an older woman with dementia to make her perform daily activities. Design/methodology/approach -The robot asked to the participant to do some daily activities; Task A, taking medicine; Task B, measuring blood pressure; and Task C, cleaning up the room in three different ways for each task. In the talking pattern 1 (TP1), the robot simply informed what the tasks were. The talking patterns 2 and 3 (TP2 and TP3) were separated according to the process of activities in two and three steps, respectively. The participant was required to answer "Yes" if she understood what the robot talked to her, and perform the tasks. Findings -The participant was not able to prepare water in the Task A when the robot spoke the TP1 (performance rate (PR) was 71.4 per cent). However, she could perfectly take medicine in the case when the robot spoke the processes of the task by the TP3 (PR was 100.0 per cent). The similar tendencies were observed in the Tasks B and C. Research limitations/implications -Multicenter studies would be required to apply these findings to a larger population. Originality/value -The authors confirmed that it might be important to determine how the robot talked to people with dementia to properly facilitate their daily activities.

Novel Technological Solutions for Assessment, Treatment, and Assistance in Mild Cognitive Impairment

“…The category “Assistance” represent the largest group of articles encompassed in this systematic literature review. This category comprises 40 papers, gathering research from 2010 to 2017, and also in this case the overwhelming majority of the study took into consideration robots as the technology used: 26 out 40 papers (Granata et al, 2010, 2013; Gross et al, 2011, 2012; Wu et al, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016; Pino et al, 2012, 2015; Seelye et al, 2012; Bruno et al, 2013; Schroeter et al, 2013; Nishiura et al, 2014; Pahl and Varadarajan, 2015; Agrigoroaie and Tapus, 2016, 2017; Broughton et al, 2016; Nakahara et al, 2016; Reppou et al, 2016; Bellotto et al, 2017; Darragh et al, 2017; Foukarakis et al, 2017; Korchut et al, 2017; Tsardoulias et al, 2017). The remaining papers are shared between two types of technology: namely, personal devices and wearable sensors, making up 14 out 40 papers (Mitseva et al, 2009; Martínez et al, 2011; Sacco et al, 2012; Diaz-Orueta et al, 2014; Meiland et al, 2014; Batista et al, 2015; König et al, 2015a; Lazarou et al, 2016; Mainetti et al, 2016, 2017; Vasileiadis et al, 2016; Kyriazakos et al, 2017; Mighali et al, 2017; Stavropoulos et al, 2017).…”

“…An example is offered by the work of Nishura et al The authors presented results from a report case study, in which a PaPeRo robot asked the participants to perform some daily activities, including taking medicines, measuring blood pressure, and cleaning up the room in three different ways for each task. Study results showed that the talking pattern changed the subjects' performances of daily activities (Nishiura et al, 2014). Another example is the study by Foukarakis et al in which the authors reported that, regarding the robot speech synthesis system, the users had difficulties understanding some phrases.…”

Comprehensible instructions from assistive robots for older adults with or without cognitive impairment

“…The most important finding in this study was that older people with attention deficit might make mistakes in their daily lives even though they are healthy older adults judged by cognitive assessment. We emphasized information should be repeated to enable people with lower attention to acquire correct information (Inoue et al, 2012;Nishiura et al, 2014).…”

“…All participants received three experiment sessions (three days within one week) with all instruction patterns. The order of tasks and instruction patterns were selected randomly (Nishiura et al, 2014). Therefore, a total of nine data (3 tasks with 3 IPs) in each participant was taken.…”

Effect of the Information Support Robot on the Daily Activity of Older People Living Alone in Actual Living Environment

“…If affirmative words are received, the information support will be terminated with the closing word ( Figure 3 ) [ 9 ]. A talking pattern allowed the older people to listen easily according to the characteristics of their cognitive impairment [ 39 ]. It was clear that the algorithm and talking pattern certainly allowed older people to obtain information.…”