System Architecture and User Interface Design for a Human-Machine Interaction System for Dementia Intervention

A growing number of older adults in America face dementia and its associated behaviors. One of the most prevalent behaviors is apathy, which leads to social isolation, reduced quality of life, cognitive decline, increased mortality and caregiver burden. Current interventions are costly and require intensive personnel resources. Given the shortage of qualified care givers, technology may be an effective and complementary approach. Research has shown that multimodal interventions that include social, physical, and cognitive activities have the best outcomes. We propose a novel system combining social robotics and virtual reality to engage older adults in tasks that target all three areas. In this paper, we describe the system architecture, which includes the Virtual system Musical Task, the social robot, the state machine, and the wand that is used as an input device. Five participants tested the system. The virtual reality and robot functioned as expected with no errors. The wand had errors below 10%. The average usability score was 89.5. Overall, this study demonstrated that the system performs as expected per the functional system requirements. Further studies are necessary to explore the functionality and usability of the system with older adults.