Assist-Bot: A Voice-Enabled Assistant for Seniors

With the increasing elderly population, healthcare systems are facing a crisis in providing 24/7 assistance to seniors. Voice-enabled robots can serve as assistants and companions for seniors. Many voice and chat systems, such as Alexa, Siri, and Google, have emerged and become the top consumer brands. However, a significant gap still exists in making these systems mimic human-like conversation. Most of these systems lack empathy and cannot understand users' expressions and intent in delivering information as expected by users. Studies have shown that seniors struggle to effectively communicate with the existing voice conversation systems, leading to a stigma around technology acceptance. In this pilot project, we explore existing literature to identify the key challenges and the types of care that seniors need, and present a personalized voice communication system that can remind about tasks such as taking medication and doing health checks; answer predefined questions about personalized routines and medications; launch specific applications such as the contactless wellness monitoring application “Veyetals”, “Uber” or a music plugin, and answer basic questions from a pre-defined Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) database. We extend existing voice bots to develop the Assist-Bot to serve as a voice-enabled assistant for nontechnical seniors. Caregivers can configure medication and check-up schedules, and contact numbers for different needs.