Köksal, A., Gu, J., Hara, K., Jiang, J., Lim, J.-H., & Xu, Q. (2025). SPASCA: Social Presence and Support with Conversational Agent for Persons Living with Dementia. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 39(28), 29649–29651. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v39i28.35355
Abstract:
We present SPASCA - a conversational AI system that promotes psychological and cognitive well-being of persons living with dementia (PLWD). This system features an AI agent that provides social presence and support to PLWD through verbal communications, without physical presence of human caregivers. The system integrates (1) a novel dialogue model that generates dialogue items relevant to the user's experiences and lifestyle, (2) a digital avatar in the form of a talking head with the identity of a caregiver who is familiar to the demented user. We develop prototypes that adopt various interaction modalities and conversational styles and report the pros and cons of different system configurations through expert review. Our system shows the potential of conversational AI for personalized and affordable healthcare services.
License type:
Publisher Copyright
Funding Info:
This research / project is supported by the SMU-A*STAR - SMU-A*STAR Joint Lab in Social and Human-Centred Computing
Grant Reference no. : SAJL- 2022-HAS002 & C232918002