Study of Stress Relief Service by Watching Personalized Videos for Elderly People at Home

In recent years, Japan has been facing a super-aging society, and the number of elderly people living at home (including the elderly requiring nursing care, living alone) has been increasing. For each older person who spends much time at home, how to deal with their individual stresses (e.g., deepening loneliness, worries about life, etc.) is a big challenge. Our research group is currently researching and developing a system to support watching over elderly people at home. In our previous study, we developed and proposed a YouTube video playback service and conducted an evaluation experiment with elderly people. However, the search and specification of videos to be viewed by the elderly depend on family members and caregivers. The videos may differ from the wishes of the elderly themselves. The purpose of this paper is to develop a prototype of a personalized video recommendation and viewing web service to promote stress reduction among the elderly at home. As an approach, we first obtain information on the hobbies and preferences of the elderly at home through a questionnaire survey (e.g., paper-based, Google form, etc.). Next, based on the questionnaire results, the service automatically recommends a list of relevant videos (by relevance and number of views) from the YouTube site. By registering the list of recommended videos to the service, the elderly can watch personalized videos at any time. This way will enable the elderly to watch videos of interest to them easily and expect to help them relieve stress.