Technical Challenges for Smooth Interaction With Seniors With Dementia: Lessons From Humanitude™

Abstract

Due to cognitive and socio-emotional decline and mental diseases, senior citizens, especially people with dementia (PwD), struggle to interact smoothly with their caregivers. Therefore, various care techniques have been proposed to develop good relationships with seniors. Among them, Humanitude is one promising technique that provides caregivers with useful interaction skills to improve their relationships with PwD, from four perspectives: face-to-face interaction, verbal communication, touch interaction, and helping care receivers stand up (physical interaction). Regardless of advances in elderly care techniques, since current social robots interact with seniors in the same manner as they do with younger adults, they lack several important functions. For example, Humanitude emphasizes the importance of interaction at a relatively intimate distance to facilitate communication with seniors. Unfortunately, few studies have developed an interaction model for clinical care communication. In this paper, we discuss the current challenges to develop a social robot that can smoothly interact with PwDs and overview the interaction skills used in Humanitude as well as the existing technologies.

Pleasant Stroke Touch on Human Back by a Human and a Robot

“…However, it remains unknown whether agents other than humans, specifically robots, could provide pleasant touch that functions similar to humans’ touch. Robots capable of providing such a pleasant touch could help alleviate problems by a lack of caregivers and thereby improve the quality of caregiving generally [ 12 , 13 ]. Some previous studies have shown that touch by a robot can provide a positive effect for humans [ 14 , 15 ].…”

Humanoid Robot Use in Cognitive Rehabilitation of Patients with Severe Brain Injury: A Pilot Study

“…In this study, it was observed that the elderly engaged more with the robot from one session to the next, showing a positive perception of interaction with it. In several studies, it has been argued that humanoid robots are a suitable tool for use with dementia patients, as well as with relatives and caregivers and that their presence brings patients with dementia in a more positive emotional state [ 27 , 28 ]. In particular, music sessions stimulate patients to recall memories and talk about their past [ 29 ].…”

Effect of multimodal comprehensive communication skills training with video analysis by artificial intelligence for physicians on acute geriatric care: a mixed-methods study

“…Accordingly, our video analysis via AI was developed to analyse healthcare professionals’ multimodal communication, that is, their face-to-face interaction, verbal communication and touch interaction. 19 25 Our system collects the viewpoints of participants using a wearable eye-tracking system during a simulated patient encounter, performs facial landmark detection and deep learning-based analyses to detect eye contact, obtains the total utterances from the data of fixed videos and detect the touch duration by annotation of the fixed videos. This study thus quantitatively analyses the communication skills of physicians for geriatric care following their multimodal comprehensive care communication skills training.…”