Adaptive Grounding And Dialogue Management For Autonomous Conversational Assistants For Elderly Users

People with age-related or congenital cognitive impairments require assistance in daily tasks to enable them to maintain a self-determined lifestyle in their own home. We developed and evaluated a prototype of an autonomous spoken dialogue assistant to support these user groups in the domain of week planning. Based on insights from previous work with a WOz study, we designed a dialogue system which caters to the interactional needs of these user groups. Subjects were able to interact successfully with the system and rated it as equivalent in terms of robustness and usability compared to the WOz prototype.