People with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) often show the problem of repetitive questioning, which brings a great burden on persons with ADRD (PwDs) and their caregivers. Conversational robots hold promise of coping with this problem and hence alleviating the burdens on caregivers. In this paper, we proposed a partially observable markov decision process (POMDP) model for the PwD-robot interaction in the context of repetitive questioning, and used Q-learning to learn an adaptive conversation strategy (i.e., rate of follow-up question and difficulty of follow-up question) towards PwDs with different cognitive capabilities and different engagement levels. The results indicated that Q-learning was helpful for action selection for the robot. This may be a useful step towards the application of conversational social robots to cope with repetitive questioning in PwDs.
University of Tennessee, Knoxville（田纳西大学诺克斯维尔分校）；Miami University（迈阿密大学）
In this paper, the robot-assisted Reminiscence Therapy (RT) is studied as a psychosocial intervention to persons with dementia (PwDs). We aim at a conversation strategy for the robot by reinforcement learning to stimulate the PwD to talk. Specifically, to characterize the stochastic reactions of a PwD to the robot's actions, a simulation model of a PwD is developed which features the transition probabilities among different PwD states consisting of the response relevance, emotion levels and confusion conditions. A Q-learning (QL) algorithm is then designed to achieve the best conversation stra…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Kyoto University（京都大学）
As the aging of society continues to accelerate, Alzheimer's Disease (AD) has received more and more attention from not only medical but also other fields, such as computer science, over the past decade. Since speech is considered one of the effective ways to diagnose cognitive decline, AD detection from speech has emerged as a hot topic. Nevertheless, such approaches fail to tackle several key issues: 1) AD is a complex neurocognitive disorder which means it is inappropriate to conduct AD detection using utterance information alone while ignoring dialogue information; 2) Utterances of AD pati…
Microsoft Corporation（微软公司）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
We study open domain dialogue generation with dialogue acts designed to explain how people engage in social chat. To imitate human behavior, we propose managing the flow of human-machine interactions with the dialogue acts as policies. The policies and response generation are jointly learned from human-human conversations, and the former is further optimized with a reinforcement learning approach. With the dialogue acts, we achieve significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods on response quality for given contexts and dialogue length in both machine-machine simulation and human-machin…
University of Tennessee（田纳西大学）；Institute of Health Professions（健康职业学院）；Genesis Neuroscience Clinic（Genesis神经科学诊所）
In this work, an online survey was used to understand the acceptability of humanoid robots and users' needs in using these robots to assist with care among people with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD), their family caregivers, health care professionals, and the general public. From November 12, 2020 to March 13, 2021, a total of 631 complete responses were collected, including 80 responses from people with mild cognitive impairment or ADRD, 245 responses from caregivers and health care professionals, and 306 responses from the general public. Overall, people with ADRD, caregive…
University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）；Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（矢量人工智能研究所）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute（阿尔伯塔机器智能研究所）
Human-computer interactive systems that rely on machine learning are becoming paramount to the lives of millions of people who use digital assistants on a daily basis. Yet, further advances are limited by the availability of data and the cost of acquiring new samples. One way to address this problem is by improving the sample efficiency of current approaches. As a solution path, we present a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm for an interactive dialogue task. We build on commonly used actor-critic methods, adding an environment model and planner that augments a learning agent to lear…
University of Denver（丹佛大学）；DreamFace Technologies, LLC.（DreamFace技术有限责任公司）
This paper presents the design, development, methodology, and the results of a pilot study on using an intelligent, emotive and perceptive social robot (aka Companionbot) for improving the quality of life of elderly people with dementia and/or depression. Ryan Companionbot prototyped in this project, is a rear-projected life-like conversational robot. Ryan is equipped with features that can (1) interpret and respond to users' emotions through facial expressions and spoken language, (2) proactively engage in conversations with users, and (3) remind them about their daily life schedules (e.g. ta…
An Interactive LLM-Based Simulator for Dementia-Related Activities of Daily Living
Worcester Polytechnic Institute（伍斯特理工学院）；University of California Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；MGH Institute of Health Professionals（麻省总医院健康专业学院）；University of New Hampshire（新罕布什尔大学）
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学深圳研究院）
To facilitate recent advances in robotics and AI for delicate collaboration between humans and machines, we propose the Kinova Gemini, an original robotic system that integrates conversational AI dialogue and visual reasoning to make the Kinova Gen3 lite robot help people retrieve objects or complete perception-based pick-and-place tasks. When a person walks up to Kinova Gen3 lite, our Kinova Gemini is able to fulfill the user's requests in three different applications: (1) It can start a natural dialogue with people to interact and assist humans to retrieve objects and hand them to the user o…
Various studies have been conducted on human-supporting robot systems. These systems have been put to practical use over the years and are now seen in our daily lives. In particular, robots communicating smoothly with people are expected to play an active role in customer service and guidance. In this case, it is essential to determine whether the customer is satisfied with the dialog robot or not. However, it is not easy to satisfy all of the customer's requests due to the diversity of the customer's speech. In this study, we developed a dialog mechanism that prevents dialog breakdowns and ke…
