JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Information and Communication Technologies are seen as tools able to support cognitive functions, monitor health and movements, provide reminders to maintain residual memory abilities and promote social support, especially among patients with dementia. Among these technologies, Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are seen as screen-based entities, designed to stimulate human face-to-face conversation skills and thus allow for natural human-machine interaction. Unfortunately, the efficacy of ECA in supporting people affected by dementia and their caregivers is not yet well studied. Therefore, research in this area is essential for the entire scientific community.

Objective:

This study aims to evaluate the usability and acceptance of the ECA Anne by seniors affected with dementia. The study is also designed to assess the ability of target users to utilize the system independently and receive valuable information from it.

Methods:

A 4-week trial was conducted involving 20 older adults with dementia and 14 family caregivers in home environment settings in Italy. This study used a mixed method approach, balancing quantitative and qualitative instruments to gather data from users. Telemetry data was also collected.

Results:

It emerges that older users were particularly engaged in providing significant responses and participated in system improvements. Some of them clearly discussed how technical problems related to speech recognition negatively impacted on the intention to use, adaptiveness, usefulness and trust. Moreover, the usability of the system achieved an encouraging score and the half of the sample recognized a role in the ECA. This study confirms that the quality of automatic speech recognition and synthesis is still a technical issue and has room for improvement, whereas touchscreen modality is almost stable and positively used by patients with dementia.

Conclusions:

This specific field of research is novel and poorly discussed in the scientific community. This could be due to its newness, yet there is an urgent need to strengthen data, research and innovation to accelerate the implementation of ECA as a future way to offer non-pharmacological support to community-dwelling persons with dementia.