Robot Companions and Smartpens for Improved Social Communication of Dementia Patients

Abstract

In this demo paper we describe how a digital pen and a humanoid robot companion can improve the social communication of a dementia patient. We propose the use of NAO, a humanoid robot, as a companion to the dementia patient in order to continuously monitor his or her activities and provide cognitive assistance in daily life situations. For example, patients can communicate with NAO through natural language by the speech dialogue functionality we integrated. Most importantly, to improve communication, i.e., sending digital messages (texting, emails), we propose the usage of a smartpen, where the patients write messages on normal paper with an invisible dot pattern to initiate hand-writing and sketch recognition in real-time. The smartpen application is embedded into the human-robot speech dialogue.