Abstract
Recently, the number of elderly people with dementia has been increasing, and this trend would be a serious social (and medical) problem in Japan. Thus, preventing and improving of dementia are very important. To solve the problem, many researches on robot-assisted therapies have been reported. Currently, various check tests are also conducted to evaluate progression of his/her dementia symptom in many welfare facilities. Some elderly persons are, however, often so nervous about the tests and consequently, these cannot be did with appropriately. These tests have to be conducted without their awareness of the tests. To solve the problem, we have been developing a system using daily conversations with a conventional robot to evaluate progression of dementia without his/her awareness. However, the conventional system could evaluate only time/geographical orientation and short-term memory. In this paper, the authors developed a new dementia evaluation system using drawing tests with a touch panel display as well as that using daily conversations.
