A Study of Conversation Support System Between the Elderly Person and Young Adults by Using Facial Expression Analysis

摘要

Japanese society is recently facing a problem of a super-aging population. The proportion of aged people is growing. The number of families with old couples and old singles is increasing. In some case s/he passes a day without speaking a word, and that causes a disuse of cognitive functions and a risk for dementia and/or depression. In the future, it is expected that young adults in the region will be involved with the elderly actively as a conversational partner. They focused on reminiscence technique which is effective to control dementia in order to reduce the mental burden of the partner young adult. We have already examined the difference of the mental burden and the quality of communication between the elderly and young adults when they use any photographs as content for communication support. As a result, depending on the category of the photo as a content for conversation support we are sure that there is tension in conversation. So, we went to build a conversation support system for the elderly and young adults to provide content according to the circumstances of the conversation to allow the conversation to go smoothly without feeling a sense of tension and discomfort. In previous studies, the frustration and discomfort was determined by using wearable devices (such as for heart or brain wave). However, in order to construct a system, it is necessary to use a non-contact device that can easily measure the frustration and discomfort. We measure the dissatisfaction, discomfort during a conversation using the expression analysis sensor. Therefore, in this study, it is an object of comparison and evaluation of the data obtained by measuring the dissatisfaction, discomfort in wearable devices (heart-EEG) and non-contact devices (expression analysis).