Automated Nursing Agent: A Software Agent for At-Home Elderly Care

摘要

The global increase in elderly population is a concern for many developed countries. The concern has to do with the financial and infrastructure challenges to assist, take care, and manage the aging population that typically requires more care, specialized personnel, and expensive facilities. While the population is indeed aging, particularly in developed countries, many of the elderly prefer remaining at home instead of moving to nursing homes. It has been demonstrated that companionship, such as other residents or pets, can significantly help preserve mental and physical health of the elderly. There has been considerable interest in building computer programs that work as an intelligent personal assistant such as Siri and Google Now, but these typically serve as knowledge navigators to search for information or do simple tasks on a smartphone. We propose an intelligent software agent that runs on tablet devices and operates as a companion to the elderly, assisting them in information retrieval, reminding them of relevant events, and more importantly, conversing with them as a human would do. In this paper, we introduce the Automated Nursing Agent (ANA) and present the technical challenges developing such a software agent.