Development of Dementia Evaluation System Using Daily Conversations ~A Study on Dementia Evaluation Method Using Simple Conversation with Robot~

Abstract

Recently, the number of elderly people with dementia has been drastically increasing. This trend would be a big social and medical problem in Japan, thus preventing and improving of dementia is so important. To solve the problem, a lot of researches on robot-assisted therapies have been reported. Dementia check tests are also conducted in welfare facilities to evaluate acuteness of his/her dementia symptom. Some elderly persons are, however, often very nervous about the tests, as a result, appropriate evaluation cannot be realized. Thus these tests have to be conducted without their awareness of the tests. To solve the problem, we discuss the dementia evaluation method using daily conversation with robots. In this paper, we developed the dementia evaluation system using simple conversations with the robot, and some evaluation experiments were conducted. This paper introduces the outline of the developed system and discusses the effectiveness of the proposed method. We also clarify problems and further works of this study in the end of this paper.