Defining affective identities in elderly nursing home residents for the design of an emotionally intelligent cognitive assistant

In this paper, we describe the first outcomes of the ACT@HOME research project which aims to develop an emotionally intelligent cognitive assistant (ICA) to engage and help older adults with Alzheimer's disease (AD) to complete activities of daily living (ADL) more independently. To accomplish this, we carried out semi-structured qualitative interviews with elderly nursing home residents in order to define their different affective identities, personalities and backgrounds. For this, a specific new interview tool was designed based on the principles of Affect Control Theory (ACT), a socio-cultural theory of affective interactions. The ICA will be programmed then to learn the different extracted affective identities (i.e., "personality") of a person during an interaction, and will tailor prompts to specific individual's needs' in a way that ensures smoother and more effective uptake and response. Preliminary results of the first analysis of the interviews show that we can distinguish clearly between certain affective identities, such as for instance 'the depressed lawyer', or the 'independent athlete' etc. and thus, define their resulting preferences in a specific prompting style provided by the ICA.