Designing an Elderly Virtual Caregiver Using Dialogue Agents and WebRTC

An aging society has gradually become a worldwide topic. To assist elderly people in daily dialogue and aid memory, a virtual caregiver with dialogue agents has been actively developed. In most virtual caregivers, limitations of system environments or devices exist. Share-ability for elderly people who are so far apart also requires improvement urgently. The purpose of this paper is to design a novel architecture of an elderly virtual caregiver. Our key idea is to regard the online chat room as a virtual house for elderly people, integrating dialogue agents and Web real-time communication (WebRTC). In the proposed architecture, we first extend its useable places and devices by sharing its interface to an online chat room. Then, we regard the action of calling a partner to chat as one of the dialogue scenarios by integrating dialogue agents and WebRTC.