Assisting Personalized Healthcare of Elderly People: Developing a Rule-Based Virtual Caregiver System Using Mobile Chatbot.

To assist personalized healthcare of elderly people, our interest is to develop a virtual caregiver system that retrieves the expression of mental and physical health states through human-computer interaction in the form of dialogue. The purpose of this paper is to implement and evaluate a virtual caregiver system using mobile chatbot. Unlike the conventional health monitoring approach, our key idea is to integrate a rule-based virtual caregiver system (called "Mind Monitoring" service) with the physical, mental, and social questionnaires into the mobile chat application.

Daily assistance for individuals with dementia via videophone.

We previously developed remote reminiscence conversation and schedule prompter systems via the videophone to improve psychological stability and to assist individuals with dementia to perform household tasks. Our results showed that the psychological stability of 1 patient persisted for 3 hours after remote conversations. The task completion rate afforded by the schedule prompter system, which displays a video reminder series automatically, was 52%.

Effectiveness of personalised reminiscence photo videos for individuals with dementia.

Reminiscence intervention is effective for increasing self-esteem and decreasing behavioural disturbances in individuals with dementia. This paper introduces the concept of a "personalised reminiscence photo video" as a convenient method for reminiscence intervention. The video utilises a slideshow video of personal photos with narration, background music, and pan/zoom visual effects.

Networked interaction therapy: relieving stress in memory-impaired people and their family members.

To relieve the stress in the lives of memory-impaired people and their family members, we propose the concept of Networked Interaction Therapy that connects them with community support group members via Internet by utilizing Internet communication, image understanding and sensory-interaction media technologies. To study their need and acceptance for our services, we made short video clips to illustrate our concept, and interviewed the care givers. Based on these studies, we also conducted the experiments with the low-fidelity mock-ups.

Successful guidance by automatic output of music and verbal messages for daily behavioural disturbances of three individuals with dementia.

There have been no previous reports of daily home activities of individuals with dementia being guided by the combination of music and verbal messages. This study evaluated the effectiveness for three individuals of music and messages which were automatically output by an IC recorder. After music was presented, messages instructed the participants to go to a day care centre, behave more peacefully and eat more at meals, respectively.