Related papers: Learning-Based Strategy Design for Robot-Assisted …
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 study explores a novel approach to advancing dementia care by integrating socially assistive robotics, reinforcement learning (RL), large language models (LLMs), and clinical domain expertise within a simulated environment. This…
Individual cognitive stimulation therapy (iCST) is a non-pharmacological intervention for improving the cognition and quality of life of persons with dementia (PwDs); however, its effectiveness is limited by low adherence to delivery by…
Socially assistive robots are increasingly being designed to interact with humans in various therapeutical scenarios. We believe that one useful scenario is providing exercise coaching for Persons with Dementia (PwD), which involves unique…
As social robots are increasingly introduced into dementia care, their embodied and interactive design may blur the boundary between artificial and lifelike entities, raising ethical concerns about robotic deception. However, it remains…
This study presents the development and testing of a conversational speech system designed for robots to detect speech biomarkers indicative of cognitive impairments in people living with dementia (PLwD). The system integrates a backend…
Deep learning (DL) techniques involving fine-tuning large numbers of model parameters have delivered impressive performance on the task of discriminating between language produced by cognitively healthy individuals, and those with…
Effective dementia caregiving requires training and adaptive communication, but assistive AI and robotics are constrained by a lack of context-rich, privacy-sensitive data on how people living with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias…
Reminiscence therapy is an inexpensive non-pharmacological therapy commonly used due to its therapeutic value for PwD, as it can be used to promote independence, positive moods and behavior, and improve their quality of life. Caregivers are…
We present a novel method for training a social robot to generate backchannels during human-robot interaction. We address the problem within an off-policy reinforcement learning framework, and show how a robot may learn to produce…
Reminiscence therapy (RT) is a common non-pharmacological intervention in dementia care. Recent technology-mediated interventions have largely focused on people with dementia through solutions that replace human facilitators with…
In robot-assisted therapy for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder, the workload of therapists during a therapeutic session is increased if they have to control the robot manually. To allow therapists to focus on the interaction with…
Societies worldwide are rapidly entering a super-aged era, making elderly health a pressing concern. The aging population is increasing the burden on national economies and households. Dementia cases are rising significantly with this…
Large language models demonstrated state-of-the-art results on various reasoning tasks when applying the chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting technique. CoT prompting guides the model into breaking tasks into a few intermediate steps and…
People living with dementia (PLWDs) face progressively declining abilities in medication management-from simple forgetfulness to complete task breakdown-yet most assistive technologies fail to adapt to these changing needs. This…
Large language model (LLM) based multi-turn dialogue systems often struggle to track dependencies across non-adjacent turns, undermining both consistency and scalability. As conversations lengthen, essential information becomes sparse and…
Demographic shifts have led to an increase in mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and this study investigates the effects of cognitive training (CT) and reminiscence therapy (RT) conducted by humans or socially assistive robots (SARs) on…
Technologies can support people with early onset dementia (PwD) to aid them in Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL). The integration of physical and virtual realities in Mixed reality technologies (MRTs) could provide scalable and…
The phrase "most cruel and revolting crimes" has been used to describe some poor historical treatment of vulnerable impaired persons by precisely those who should have had the responsibility of protecting and helping them. We believe we…
Developing artificial intelligence based assistive systems to aid Persons with Dementia (PwD) requires large amounts of training data. However, data collection poses ethical, legal, economic, and logistic issues. Synthetic data generation…