Humanitude: first step towards the creation of a voice-bot companion for persons with dementia

During the last decade, the life span of the world has been incremented year by year, which comes with a higher probability of suffering from an illness related to aging. An example of this is dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, which causes a progressive decline in various cognitive functions. The costs of living with these types of diseases can destroy a family’s economy if there is no early treatment and detection. This article will aim to develop a protocol to obtain data from interviewing people with cognitive-related questions. This data will form a training corpus to help the development of a neural network that can give a dementia pre-diagnosis. Subsequently, the neural network can be used to program an adaptative companion voice-bot for people with dementia. This will focus on the conversation pillar of Humanitude, a care methodology that can be applied to persons with dementia. The development of this protocol would lead to the creation of one of the few Spanish-based training corpus available for detecting dementia. It is an important step toward developing new tools that can make an early pre-diagnosis or serve as an alternative caregiving solution for people with this condition. Furthermore, this project can lead to the creation of different research whose solutions use Spanish as its main language.