A Conversational Robot to Conduct Therapeutic Interventions for Dementia

Verbal communication is an essential component of effective nonpharma-cological interventions for people with dementia (PwD). We describe Eva, a conversational robot developed to conduct therapeutic interventions for PwD. A previously reported study conducted with Eva using a Wizard-of-Oz approach proved it successfully engaged PwD with the sessions. This paper reports improvements to Eva that allow the robot to guide the therapy sessions without human intervention and findings from its deployment in a geriatric residence. These improvements include the automatic generation of a therapy script tailored to the profile and preferences of the participants, expectations about the type and length of responses by participants to certain queries, and strategies to recover from communication breakdowns. A user study with five PwD shows that when acting in fully autonomous mode, Eva is as effective in engaging participants in the therapy as with the Wizard-of-Oz condition, and that communication breakdowns are adequately resolved.