Implementing and Evaluating feedback feature of Mind Monitoring Service for Elderly People at Home

Abstract

To support sustainable in-home long-term care, it is essential to monitor mental states of elderly people at home, and to encourage their ability of self-care. However, many challenges exist in practice, including limitations of human interventions, sensor-based monitoring, the daily recording and externalization of mental states. In the previous research, we have proposed Mind Monitoring Service, which aims to monitor mental states and promote self-care of elderly people at home. In the proposed service, a chatbot asks a user specific questions to acquire his/her mental state. Based on the answers, the service assesses the mental state. In this research, we develop a new feature of weekly feedback. The feature automatically reviews answers of past one week, and sends advice to improve the current situation. We conduct an experiment to evaluate the effectiveness. Through the experiment, it was confirmed that the weekly feedback encouraged self-care consciousness and increased motivation of subjects.