Dementia

The World Health Organisation reported that about 47 million people worldwide are living with dementia in 2015 and this number would be projected to triple by 2050^[1]. PwD tend to have poor short-term memory and become increasing disoriented. However, there is no guaranteed curing method for dementia and the World Dementia Council concludes that regular activity, management of cardiovascular risk factors(diabetes, obesity, smoking, and hypertension), a healthy diet and lifelong learning/cognitive training help reduce the risk of cognitive decline and therefore delay the deterioration of dementia^[2].
For our group’s robot, we try to use the daily task reminder to help the PwD live a regular life and train their cognition through the quiz to slow the progression of dementia.

Music

Accumulating research shows that PwD’s ability to enjoy music and respond to music is potentially preserved even in the late or severe stages of dementia even when verbal communication may have ceased^[3]. Based on this idea, instead of using the voice reminder directly, our robot aims to use personalized music as a reminder. Also, the research shows that explicit memory for music is as vulnerable as verbal or other types of nonmusical memory for PwD, while the implicit memory stays robust. We design our robot based on this idea, the personalised music is based on the PwD’s implicit knowledge for example they may choose a piece of more peaceful music as a reminder to sleep. This knowledge might not or is late to be impaired during the structural and functional change of the brain. However, why music therapy works is a remaining research problem because currently, it's working as a black box common^[4], where music is used as an input and its effect as a simple output.

Robot

Recently, multiple companion robots designed for PwD are designed to help the life of PwD and their relatives. The usefulness and robots and the ethical considerations are also largely discussed.
The research shows that Pwd need a customised robot to meet individual needs. The mismatch between needs and solutions are a barrier to acceptance^[5]. Besides, PwD usually want information about future events long before they were due to occur^[6].

TDP

A design pattern provides a general repeatable solution. The team design pattern is extended from the design pattern to meet the various team requirements. The team design pattern should be able to (1) provide an intuitive and simple way to introduce the interaction between the human and machine, (2) generalize to a broad range of teamwork capabilities, (3) clarify different solutions and situations, (4) dive deep from an intuitive way to a more professional expression^[7].

Reference

[1] Prince, M., Guerchet, M., & Prina, M. (2015). The Epidemiology and Impact of Dementia-Current State and Future Trends. WHO Thematic Briefing.
[2] Baumgart, M., Snyder, H. M., Carrillo, M. C., Fazio, S., Kim, H., & Johns, H. (2015). Summary of the evidence on modifiable risk factors for cognitive decline and dementia: a population-based perspective. Alzheimer's & Dementia, 11(6), 718-726.
[3] Baird, A., & Samson, S. (2015). Music and dementia. Progress in brain research, 217, 207-235.
[4] Hara, M. (2011). Music in dementia care: Increased understanding through mixed research methods. Music and Arts in Action, 3(2), 34-58.
[5] Casey, D., Felzmann, H., Pegman, G., Kouroupetroglou, C., Murphy, K., Koumpis, A., & Whelan, S. (2016, July). What people with dementia want: designing MARIO an acceptable robot companion. In International conference on computers helping people with special needs (pp. 318-325). Springer, Cham.
[6] Hawkey, K., Inkpen, K. M., Rockwood, K., McAllister, M., & Slonim, J. (2005, October). Requirements gathering with alzheimer's patients and caregivers. In Proceedings of the 7th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility (pp. 142-149).
[7] van Diggelen, Jurriaan and Johnson, Matthew. (2019). Team Design Patterns. Association for Computing Machinery.