Model of Care and New Technologies, IRCCS INRCA - National Institute of Health and Science on Ageing, Ancona, Italy.
iHomeLab - University of Applied Sciences & Arts, Lucerne, Switzerland.
JMIR Mhealth Uhealth. 2021 Jun 25;9(6):e25891. doi: 10.2196/25891.
Information and communication technologies are tools that are 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, allowing for natural human-machine interaction. Unfortunately, the evidence that such agents deliver care benefits in supporting people affected by dementia and their caregivers has not yet been well studied. Therefore, research in this area is essential for the entire scientific community.
This study aims to evaluate the usability and acceptability of the virtual agent Anne by people living with dementia. The study is also designed to assess the ability of target users to use the system independently and receive valuable information from it.
We conducted a 4-week trial that involved 20 older adults living with dementia and 14 family caregivers in home environment settings in Italy. This study used a mixed methods approach, balancing quantitative and qualitative instruments to gather data from users. Telemetry data were also collected.
Older users were particularly engaged in providing significant responses and participating in system improvements. Some of them clearly discussed how technical problems related to speech recognition had a negative impact on the intention to use, adaptiveness, usefulness, and trust. Moreover, the usability of the system achieved an encouraging score, and half of the sample recognized a role of the agent Anne. This study confirms that the quality of automatic speech recognition and synthesis is still a technical issue and has room for improvement, whereas the touch screen modality is almost stable and positively used by patients with dementia.
This study demonstrated the ability of target users to use the system independently in their home environment; overall, the involved participants shared good engagement with the system, approaching the virtual agents as a companion able to support memory and enjoyment needs. Therefore, this research provides data that sustain the use of ECAs as future eHealth systems that are able to address the basic and higher-level needs of people living with dementia. This specific field of research is novel and poorly discussed in the scientific community. This could be because of its novelty, yet there is an urgent need to strengthen data, research, and innovation to accelerate the implementation of ECAs as a future method to offer nonpharmacological support to community-dwelling people with dementia.
信息和通信技术是能够支持认知功能、监测健康和运动、提供记忆能力保持的提醒、促进社会支持的工具，尤其是在痴呆症患者中。在这些技术中，实体化的会话代理（ECA）被视为旨在刺激人类面对面交谈技能的基于屏幕的实体，从而实现自然的人机交互。不幸的是，这些代理在提供痴呆症患者及其护理人员的护理益处方面的证据尚未得到充分研究。因此，该领域的研究对于整个科学界都是必不可少的。
本研究旨在评估虚拟代理 Anne 在患有痴呆症的人群中的可用性和可接受性。该研究还旨在评估目标用户独立使用该系统并从中获取有价值信息的能力。
我们在意大利的家庭环境中进行了为期 4 周的试验，涉及 20 名患有痴呆症的老年人和 14 名家庭护理人员。本研究采用了混合方法，平衡了定量和定性的工具，从用户那里收集数据。还收集了遥测数据。
老年用户特别热衷于提供重要的回复并参与系统改进。他们中的一些人清楚地讨论了与语音识别相关的技术问题如何对使用意图、适应性、有用性和信任产生负面影响。此外，系统的可用性获得了令人鼓舞的评分，并且样本的一半识别了代理 Anne 的角色。这项研究证实，自动语音识别和合成的质量仍然是一个技术问题，有待改进，而触摸屏模式几乎是稳定的，并且受到痴呆症患者的积极使用。
本研究证明了目标用户在其家庭环境中独立使用系统的能力；总体而言，参与的参与者与系统的互动良好，将虚拟代理视为能够满足记忆和享受需求的伴侣。因此，这项研究提供了数据，支持将 ECA 作为未来的电子健康系统使用，这些系统能够满足患有痴呆症的人的基本和更高层次的需求。这一特定的研究领域是新颖的，在科学界讨论甚少。这可能是因为它的新颖性，但迫切需要加强数据、研究和创新，以加速将 ECA 作为为社区居住的痴呆症患者提供非药物支持的未来方法的实施。
