Design and proof of concept of chatbot for people with dementia

Abstract

Dementia is a chronic, degenerative, incapacitating disease that affects millions of people yearly. People with dementia require constant supervision and assistance, unfortunately, most caregivers are informal since professional healthcare can be unaffordable. We believe that this burden could be alleviated using a chatbot. Chatbots have seen an increase in use in healthcare over the past decade and they have been proven especially effective dealing with mental health disorders and chronic conditions. However, there is still room for improvement regarding their intelligence when compared to other cutting edge conversational agents and there are barely any bots that support Spanish. Furthermore, there are fewer chatbots specialized for people with any type of dementia. Alzheimer’s being the most common one, this research’s goal is to determine what features and characteristicsa chatbot for people with Alzheimer’s dementia should have. A comparative analysis of healthcare chatbots and development tools was conducted as groundwork for the design. An underdeveloped instance of said chatbot was implemented as a proof of concept, the architecture proposed allows for progress to be made on the chatbot without compromising its integrity. All the development was done using Azure tools, namely the bot framework composer, which was sufficient for the intended purposes but it poses serious limitations.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease, Alzheimer’s dementia, Conversational Agent, Chatbot, Smart Health

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1003484