Alma
A chatbot to help people with dementia communicate
Dementia is a disease that still doesn’t really have a cure. Some of the bigger symptoms of dementia include speech impairments which result in people with dementia not being able to communicate efficiently. Which includes being able to talk about their own symptoms. Besides not always being able to talk about their symptoms efficiently,some people with dementia also deny their symptoms or don’t know they have them. The aim of this study is to figure out if modern technologies like in this case a chatbot can help people with dementia talk about their symptoms, and how people with dementia react to these technologies. During this study, care facilities for people with dementia were visited to test the chatbot that was created for this study. So far results have been positive to some extent, not everyone was able to interact directly with the chatbot but with the help of a mediator the conversation went smoothly, the amount of participants has been too limited to draw conclusions so far.
Info:
Project: M2.1 Project
Year: 2022
Duration: 1 Semester
Coach: Minha Lee
Credits: boost.ai, Yvon Ruitenburg
What I have learned from this project is to work with a more difficult target group, namely people with dementia. I also further developed my understanding of Conversational Agents and enhanced my knowledge of the boost.ai software and web developtment. For this project itself I have also gotten better in analyzing large amount of qualative data (transcribing and thematic analysis).
