A Study on Topic Control Method for Dementia Evaluation Using Conversation 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 very 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 discussed the retrieval method of topic path for the evaluation questions in simple conversations. This paper shows the outline of the proposed method and discusses the effectiveness of the proposed method. We also clarify problems and further works of this study.