Hara, K., Natalie, R., Cheong, W. S., Gu, J., Xu, Q. (2024). Exploring Conversations between a Practitioner and a Person with Dementia. The 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3663548.3688523
Abstract:
In social service centers, practitioners engage in conversations with
clients with dementia to facilitate their daily activities and provide
support when they are distressed. However, the nature of the care
demands the practitioner’s active engagement, which becomes difficult
to deliver as the number of people who need care expands.
Researchers have been investigating the efficacy of developing
agents that assume conversational tasks to alleviate this work. To
contribute to the future design of agents for caregiving, we collected
and analyzed ten conversations between clients with mild
dementia and practitioners who provide care. Our analyses of turntaking
dynamics and dialogue acts with 15k utterances uncovered
patterns such as noticeable differences in clients’ and practitioners’
conversational dynamics and the prevalence of neutral-toned,
question-oriented utterances by practitioners. We then prototyped
a large language model-based script that generates responses to
client utterances.We found potential approaches and challenges for
making its utterance pattern more similar to that of a practitioner
License type:
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Funding Info:
This research / project is supported by the Singapore Management University, and Agency for Science, Technology and Research - SMU-A*STAR Joint Lab in Social and Human-Centered Computing | Human-AI Synergy Pillar
Grant Reference no. : SAJL-2022-HAS002/C232918002