Communication strategies for a computerized caregiver for individuals with Alzheimer's disease

Currently, health care costs associated with aging at home can be prohibitive if individuals require continual or periodic supervision or assistance because of Alzheimer’s disease. These costs, normally associated with human caregivers, can be mitigated to some extent given automated systems that mimic some of their functions. In this paper, we present inaugural work towards producing a generic automated system that assists individuals with Alzheimer’s to complete daily tasks using verbal communication. Here, we show how to improve rates of correct speech recognition by preprocessing acoustic noise and by modifying the vocabulary according to the task. We conclude by outlining current directions of research including specialized grammars and automatic detection of confusion.