Spoken Conversational Agents for Older Adults: Who Are the Stakeholders and What Do They Expect? (original) (raw)
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Conversational Agents for the Elderly, the Guardian Platform
Anais do XI Computer on the Beach - COTB '20, 2020
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IASDR2023: Life Changing Design, 2023
Voice, as one of the most natural means of communication for the elderly given their declining physical and cognitive abilities, has the potential to reduce interaction barriers with newly emerging technologies. In parallel to this, studies focusing on the elderly as a user group have escalated in academia due to events such as the increasing ageing population and global epidemics like COVID-19. However, the focus has been mostly on their declining mental and physical abilities. This paper aims to investigate the hedonic aspects of Voice-based Conversational Agents (VCAs) for the elderly. In this respect, we conducted in-depth interviews with 13 participants, 9 of whom were elderly over the age of 75, and 4 of whom were caregivers, to examine the daily life practices and values of the elderly together with possibilities of VCAs to create positive experiences in their lives. This paper presents the perspectives of the elderly on VCAs by taking into consideration their perspectives on life and technology. In the end, the paper makes suggestions on which design decisions can support the positive hedonic aspects in the lives of the elderly. Our main finding shows that VCAs can provide a positive experience for the elderly beyond a pragmatic approach if they can be integrated into their daily routines and increase their relatedness with people without harming the areas where they feel competence and autonomy.
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Proceedings of the Latin American conference on Human-computer interaction, 2003
The main aim of this paper is to outline how a new technology, Voice XML can be used to provide Internet access for older adults who do not have a computer. The design of the Voice XML dialogues which enable the interaction is informed by the experience of workers on the Age Resource Desk at Age concern Oxfordshire and comments from their clients who experimented with a VoiceXML system. It is hoped that systems such as the ones described in this paper will to address the challenge of enabling older adults to participate in ICT. Older people often have little knowledge of computing and in addition age associated impairment particularly memory and sight loss make using standard desktop computers difficult. The new solution put forward here uses XML based technology to provide alternative forms of Web access through VoiceXML which offers Web access over the telephone and a grammar system from which to build dialogues. The design of the Voice XML dialogues is crucial to the success of the system. Although there is no need to learn how to use a computer, speech systems also pose some problems for older adults. This paper describes special features in the dialogue which help older adults to use the system and reports experiments carried out to see how successful the dialogue was for older adults. It is acknowledged that the special design put forward in this paper does not help older adults alone. Features which help users to remember how to use a dialogue are useful for everybody.
How Can Intelligent Conversational Agents Help? The Needs of Geriatric Patients and Their Caregivers
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The population in Europe grows older; only between the years 2007 and 2017 the number of people aged 65 and older increased by 2.4%. With the increasing age, the time that an average individual suffers from illnesses, loss of autonomy, deterioration of mental capacity, etc., and is thus in need of care in their old age also increased substantially. This calls for qualified care personnel. However, qualified personnel is scarce. To alleviate the situation, embodied conversational agents (ECAs) that are able to interact with care recipients, their carers and medical personnel would be a great asset -for instance, by acting as social companions, coaches or medical assistants. In any of these roles, ECAs must be guided by the needs of the targeted interaction partner and act within a well-defined strict ethical and legal framework. Especially the interaction with geriatric patients requires an acquaintance with the basics of geritatric medicine, its ethical aspects and the available models that help to assess them.
To Adapt or Not to Adapt ? Older Adults Enacting Agency in Dialogues with an Unknowledgeable Agent
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Health-promoting digital agents, taking on the role of an assistant, coach or companion, are expected to have knowledge about a person's medical and health aspects, yet they typically lack knowledge about the person's activities. These activities may vary daily or weekly and are contextually situated, posing challenges for the human-agent interaction. This pilot study aimed to explore the experiences and behaviors of older adults when interacting with an initially unknowledgeable digital agent that queries them about an activity that they are simultaneously engaged in. Five older adults participated in a scenario involving preparing coffee followed by having coffee with a guest. While performing these activities, participants educated the smartwatch-embedded agent, named Virtual Occupational Therapist (VOT), about their activity performance by answering a set of activity-ontology based questions posed by the VOT. Participants' interactions with the VOT were observed, followed by a semi-structured interview focusing on their experience with the VOT. Collected data were analyzed using an activity-theoretical framework. Results revealed participants exhibited agency and autonomy, deciding whether to adapt to the VOT's actions in three phases: adjustment to the VOT, partial adjustment, and the exercise of agency by putting the VOT to sleep after the social conditions and activity changed. Results imply that the VOT should incorporate the ability to distinguish when humans collaborate as expected by the VOT and when they choose not to comply and instead act according to their own agenda. Future research focuses on how collaboration evolves and how the VOT needs to adapt in the process. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models; Empirical studies in HCI; Collaborative content creation; Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs International 4.0 License.
Conversational Assistants for Elderly Users - The Importance of Socially Cooperative Dialogue
2018
Conversational agents can provide valuable cognitive and/or emotional assistance to elderly users or people with cognitive impairments who often have difficulties in organizing and following a structured day schedule. Previous research showed that a virtual assistant that can interact in spoken language would be a desirable help for those users. However, these user groups pose specific requirements for spoken dialogue interaction that existing systems hardly meet. This paper presents work on a virtual conversational assistant that was designed for, and together with, elderly as well as cognitively handicapped users. It has been specifically developed to enable ‘socially cooperative dialogue’ – adaptive and aware conversational interaction in which mutual understanding is co-constructed and ensured collaboratively. The technical approach is described and results of evaluation studies are reported.
2016
Populations in developed societies show an increasingly higher life expectancy across the globe. To support older adults to live longer and healthier lives in the familiar surroundings of their homes, technological developments, such as robots and avatars, have a great potential. To investigate long-term interactions between older adults and a "bi-bodied conversational agent" (an agent that has both an avatar and a robot embodiment), a user-centred design approach was employed in the design and development of a conversational agent. Firstly, the requirements of the agent were elicited through a set of focus groups with the target users – older adults. Then, the agent was iteratively designed and implemented: a robot body and avatar body were created. Finally, a Wizard-of-Oz control panel was created to control and compare each of the two bodies. Current research outcomes describe the elicited requirements baseline of a bi-bodied conversational agent for older adults. Futur...
Dialogue Design and Management for Multi-Session Casual Conversation with Older Adults
ArXiv, 2019
We address the problem of designing a conversational avatar capable of a sequence of casual conversations with older adults. Users at risk of loneliness, social anxiety or a sense of ennui may benefit from practicing such conversations in private, at their convenience. We describe an automatic spoken dialogue manager for LISSA, an on-screen virtual agent that can keep older users involved in conversations over several sessions, each lasting 10-20 minutes. The idea behind LISSA is to improve users' communication skills by providing feedback on their non-verbal behavior at certain points in the course of the conversations. In this paper, we analyze the dialogues collected from the first session between LISSA and each of 8 participants. We examine the quality of the conversations by comparing the transcripts with those collected in a WOZ setting. LISSA's contributions to the conversations were judged by research assistants who rated the extent to which the contributions were &q...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Background: Retirement is recognized as a factor influencing the ageing process. Today, virtual health coaching systems can play a pivotal role in supporting older adults’ active and healthy ageing. This study wants to answer two research questions: (1) What are the user requirements of a virtual coach (VC) based on an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) for motivating older adults in transition to retirement to adopt a healthy lifestyle? (2) How could a VC address the active and healthy ageing dimensions, even during COVID-19 times? Methods: Two-wave focus-groups with 60 end-users aged 55 and over and 27 follow-up telephone interviews were carried out in Austria, Italy and the Netherlands in 2019–2020. Qualitative data were analysed by way of framework analysis. Results: End-users suggest the VC should motivate older workers and retirees to practice physical activity, maintain social contacts and emotional well-being. The ECA should be reactive, customizable, expressive, sympatheti...
Empowering Well-Being Through Conversational Coaching for Active and Healthy Ageing
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2022
With life expectancy growing rapidly over the past century, societies are being increasingly faced with a need to find smart living solutions for elderly care and active ageing. The e-VITA project, which is a joint European (H2020) and Japanese (MIC) funded project, is based on an innovative approach to virtual coaching that addresses the crucial domains of active and healthy ageing. In this paper we describe the role of spoken dialogue technology in the project. Requirements for the virtual coach were elicited through a process of participatory design in workshops, focus groups, and living labs, and a number of use cases were identified for development using the open-source RASA framework. Knowledge Graphs are used as a shared representation within the system, enabling an integration of multimodal data, context, and domain knowledge.