Abstract
In Japan, “Robot Assisted Therapies” and “Dementia Check Tests” have been conducted to curb growing dementia person and prevent dementia. However, some elderly persons are 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.
This paper proposed a new method to evaluate dementia severity without their awareness of the tests. In the proposed method, we made a new dementia severity rating scale based on HDS–R, and evaluation experiments in the welfare facility were conducted. In the experiments, we implemented HDS–R into the communication robot called “ifbot”. Ten examinees were employed and their dementia severity were evaluated by (1) the proposed dementia scale and (2) HDS–R. The examinees were divided into two groups based on dementia severity rating, and Mann-Whitney test was conducted. The obtained result showed that the proposed dementia scale could express dementia severity rate appropriately. After advanced discussions, it was clarified the proposed method had problems in voice input, recognition and answer judgment process.
