(Spoken Dialogue Educational Health and Wellbeing Companion Robots)

The number of people over 65 in the U.S. will more than double in roughly the first quarter of this century. Many of these elderly would prefer to maintain their independence and remain in their homes. Additionally, many suffer from depression. We are researching means of supporting these seniors via emotive spoken-dialogue companion robots (Companionbots; Nielsen PI, NSF $1.96M total 2011-2015; UNT, CU, DU, UCD Anschutz Medical Campus, and Boulder Language Technologies). The focus of the research is on dialoguing, especially generating and answering questions, in the context of providing education and training related to depression, monitoring participants for signs of physical, mental or emotional deterioration, and being a companion. NLP will capitalize on multimodal input and output, be heavily context dependent and tightly integrated with a user model and history. ML will emphasize co-training on multimodal input and user-assisted semi-supervised learning from massive data sets and data streams. Future work will include massive-scale data mining over the information collected by the Companionbots.

Related Posters

Companionbots for Proactive Therapeutic Dialog on Depression

Rodney Nielsen, Kate Bailey, Nishitha Guntakandla, Bandita Sarma, Abhiraj Tomar, Anil Veerepally
Co-PIs: Wilson Pace & Benjamin Miller, UCD-Anschutz Medical Campus;
W. Ward & D. Bolanos, Boulder Language Technologies; Mohammed Mahoor, DU
Poster

Improving Cognition in the Elderly via Dialogue-Based Games with Teachable Robot Agents

Natalie Parde & Rodney Nielsen
Poster presented at the CRA-Women Graduate Cohort Workshop, 2014

Meet the HiLT Lab Companionbots

Banlu

Banlu, Companionbot

Banlu, (Chinese for Companion), was the first companionbot to join the HiLT Lab. She is a custom built companionbot. We will post more info on Banlu as the project continues.

Grace

Grace, Companionbot

Grace, a Nao Robot, joined the HiLT lab this semester. We will post more info on Grace as the project continues. Grace has a twitter account (@GraceHilt) where you can follow the latest details of her activity in the HiLT lab.

Bobby

Bobby, Companionbot

Bobby, a Nao Robot, joined the HiLT lab this semester. We will post more info on Bobby as the project continues. Bobby has a twitter account (@BobbyHilt) where you can follow the latest details of his activity in the HiLT lab.