Cognitive companion for elderly

The world today is fraught with many problems – climate change, food and water security and lack of employment to name a few. Another such issue is the rapid increase of the aging population. The process of aging is natural, but it also brings about the declination of various faculties of the body....

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Tay, Han Yi
Other Authors: Tan Ah Hwee
Format: Final Year Project (FYP)
Language:English
Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/138177
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author Tay, Han Yi
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author_facet Tan Ah Hwee
Tay, Han Yi
author_sort Tay, Han Yi
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description The world today is fraught with many problems – climate change, food and water security and lack of employment to name a few. Another such issue is the rapid increase of the aging population. The process of aging is natural, but it also brings about the declination of various faculties of the body. Elderly tend to experience less agility in their bodies, resulting in slower movements in their limbs. They might also struggle with the deterioration of their cognitive functions which can lead to other issues such as dementia and depression. Dementia, being the slowing down of ability to process, can be mitigated by mitigated using therapy that engages the cognitive abilities of mental calculation, decision making and learning capabilities. One such researched therapy is called the Individual Cognitive Stimulating Therapy (ICST). Therapy should be easily available to those who need it. Therefore, this project aims to deliver ICST to elderly with dementia via a chatbot. In order to mimic a person conducting the therapy session with the elderly, the chatbot will be imbued with human-like characteristics. These characteristics have been defined as the self-awareness aspects of a conversational agent. Through this project, a chatbot has been designed with considerations done based on researching on other intelligent agents, literary readings on self-awareness and readings about the therapy. This project has produced a system architecture design, conversation algorithm flow, database design and a chatbot platform for users to interact with. In this project, issues and challenges faced were having to implement a memory model and chatbot from scratch with no prior reference code. Other challenges include getting users to develop attachment to the chatbot, engaging the users with an active and natural conversation, having to mimic a human like conversation. This project is completed using Python 3 for the conversation algorithm, MongoDB for the two databases, Wit Ai as the natural language processing framework and Django to create the website platform. The basic chatbot created can be used as a steppingstone for the next project to improve on and create a more complete and user friendly chatbot.
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spelling ntu-10356/1381772020-05-29T09:11:17Z Cognitive companion for elderly Tay, Han Yi Tan Ah Hwee School of Computer Science and Engineering Budhitama Subagdja ASAHTan@ntu.edu.sg Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computer applications::Life and medical sciences The world today is fraught with many problems – climate change, food and water security and lack of employment to name a few. Another such issue is the rapid increase of the aging population. The process of aging is natural, but it also brings about the declination of various faculties of the body. Elderly tend to experience less agility in their bodies, resulting in slower movements in their limbs. They might also struggle with the deterioration of their cognitive functions which can lead to other issues such as dementia and depression. Dementia, being the slowing down of ability to process, can be mitigated by mitigated using therapy that engages the cognitive abilities of mental calculation, decision making and learning capabilities. One such researched therapy is called the Individual Cognitive Stimulating Therapy (ICST). Therapy should be easily available to those who need it. Therefore, this project aims to deliver ICST to elderly with dementia via a chatbot. In order to mimic a person conducting the therapy session with the elderly, the chatbot will be imbued with human-like characteristics. These characteristics have been defined as the self-awareness aspects of a conversational agent. Through this project, a chatbot has been designed with considerations done based on researching on other intelligent agents, literary readings on self-awareness and readings about the therapy. This project has produced a system architecture design, conversation algorithm flow, database design and a chatbot platform for users to interact with. In this project, issues and challenges faced were having to implement a memory model and chatbot from scratch with no prior reference code. Other challenges include getting users to develop attachment to the chatbot, engaging the users with an active and natural conversation, having to mimic a human like conversation. This project is completed using Python 3 for the conversation algorithm, MongoDB for the two databases, Wit Ai as the natural language processing framework and Django to create the website platform. The basic chatbot created can be used as a steppingstone for the next project to improve on and create a more complete and user friendly chatbot. Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Science) 2020-04-28T02:00:22Z 2020-04-28T02:00:22Z 2020 Final Year Project (FYP) https://hdl.handle.net/10356/138177 en SCSE 19-0548 application/pdf Nanyang Technological University
spellingShingle Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computer applications::Life and medical sciences
Tay, Han Yi
Cognitive companion for elderly
title Cognitive companion for elderly
title_full Cognitive companion for elderly
title_fullStr Cognitive companion for elderly
title_full_unstemmed Cognitive companion for elderly
title_short Cognitive companion for elderly
title_sort cognitive companion for elderly
topic Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computer applications::Life and medical sciences
url https://hdl.handle.net/10356/138177
work_keys_str_mv AT tayhanyi cognitivecompanionforelderly