Develope a robot for tour guiding.

The number of dementia patients increases rapidly in Taiwan recently. Dementia has great impact on personal healthy, families’ and the national economy. Caregivers have to not only care daily living and social functioning of patients, but also to respond to the individual and demand of patients. As a result, caregivers are usually exhausted due to the pressure and burden of dementia patients. Based on the above observations, we propose an innovative dementia care environment to reduce the high cost of caring for dementia patients and also reduce the burden on caregivers. The proposed system integrates mobile technology, smart home, and robotics technology to provide the patients demand analysis and automatic living assistance. It monitors the patient’s activities and analyzes the degree of behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia. In addition, it also infers which devices give patient service better by using heuristic optimization algorithm. Smart appliances and a robot can interact with patients to reduce the burden on caregivers so that they can cooperatively enhance the quality of life of both dementia patients and caregivers. Next, we also provide a platform for collecting personal living and social information. We focus on establishing a personalized social environment by technology-mediated social support intervention service for the elderly with dementia. We will implement a wearable device to detect physical functions of the elderly and provide rehabilitative suggestions. By collecting and analyzing all kind of social data, we will build a personal social interaction model for dementia patients. Dementia patient often has bad memory, and the discontinuous memory causes the generation of repeating behavior. Therefore, we also propose a wearable device with embedded camera that allows patients to record their daily lives with first-person view. The system detects their behaviors and the changes of scenarios, and creates their personal diaries by capturing images. The record helps to delay the process of memory loss and enhances the connectivity of memories. Through behavior recognition, the system also identifies the common events among dementia patients. Facing gradual degradation course of the dementia, caregivers often report heavy care burden, poor quality of life, and physical and psychological symptoms. Care burden can be affected by individual and interpersonal factors. Due to the emphasis on family relationship, family members may perceive various degrees of stress as a result of different familial roles and sense of filial obligations. However, the emphasis on the cultural value of family harmony and enhancement of connection between family members may cultivate, and be affected by as well, psychological resilience and positive response when coping with care burden that they have experienced. In particular, given that technology-based interventions have been found to be effective to reduce the burden of dementia caregiver, the aims of this study will investigate whether technology-based interventions will influence family resilience and in turns whether intervention effect may be resulted from the promotion of family resilience. It is expected that the psychological processing of family facing dementia patient in Taiwan as well as the intervention effect of mobile technology on mental health of dementia caregiver can be deliberately understood through qualitative and quantitative analyses in the present study. To sum up, the objective of this project is therefore to develop innovative mobile technologies that assist both dementia patients and caregivers. More concretely, we want to develop mobile technologies that “observe”, “aware”, “empathize”, “prevent crisis” and “promote doing health behavior of patients with dementia”. By constructing smart healthcare environment and by recording the view with first-person perspective camera. In addition, we also propose a social care information platform to assist dementia patient. Our research results are able to reduce the pressure and cost of caring to patients with dementia and improve the quality of life of patients with dementia. Finally, we also investigate “sense of obligation” and “family resilience” that may cause impact to families care dementia patient in order to further understand whether development of mobile technology really improves quality of lives of the caregivers and patients with dementia.