The investigators will develop and assess an AI Conversational Agent that will assist elderly persons with cognitive decline. The agent will be developed using a dialogic model which is intended to address user issues of comprehension and acceptance; they will function to assist with calendar and event-related tasks. Laboratory development of prototype agents will be followed by assessment of in-home use of the prototypes. There is a very substantial need to develop AI technologies to support those ageing in place, and this project has innovative plans for doing so. These impacts will be achieved by engaging with pertinent stakeholder groups including designers and developers of conversational agents, health care professionals who assist the elderly, and the elderly themselves. More broadly, if the project succeeds in helping the elderly become comfortable with using conversational agents to assist with calendar related tasks, that success may help them to become more comfortable with using AI agents to assist with other activities associated with physical and mental health; in short, the results of this project may serve to address rising health care costs over time.
This award supports a research project that uses a human-centered design approach to integrate physiological and conversational data to assess the physical, emotional, and cognitive status of the user. That assessment will then be factored into how a conversation-based voice-activated system responds to the user. The research team will develop a turn-based dialog framework for a conversational assistant. The framework will center around handling calendars and activities, such as social and leisure activities, or health-related appointments for elderly people. It will then be used to develop a prototype AI system that supports daily activity scheduling. The team will also develop personalized user models that factor in cognitive and physical ability when considering how best to interact with elderly users. They will also examine longer-term changes in how older adults or others prefer to interact with a conversational agent, as they gain more familiarity with it. The results of this project will contribute to improving the health, wellbeing, and independence of people who have reduced capacity due to illness or advanced age, or simply who live alone.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
