Assessing the Practicality of Designing a Comprehensive Intelligent
Conversation Agent to Assist in Dementia Care
Ritwik Raj Saxena
a
and Arshia Khan
b
Department of Computer Science, University of Minnesota, Duluth Campus, Duluth, Minnesota, U.S.A.
Keywords: Dementia, Generative Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing,
Intelligent Conversation Agents, Multi-Stakeholder Approach, Clinical Decision Support Systems, Data Privacy.
Abstract: Tools and techniques powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and its subfields like machine learning (ML) and
natural language processing (NLP) have pervaded most disciplines across the global technological,
economical, and sociocultural landscapes. In most areas, the permeation of AI has shown exceptional promise.
Medicine and healthcare constitute a domain which has not remained aloof from the positive implications of
harnessing AI. AI-driven tools, for instance in neuroimaging and health monitoring, have painted a tapestry
of encouraging possibilities in this province. Such tools have found application in fields like assisting
diagnosis, disease progression tracking, and patient management in many subjects within medicine. Intelligent
conversation agents, more informally referred to as AI-based chatbots, form one of the most prevalent
applications of AI. AI-fueled chatbots like ChatGPT have made rampant inroads into the lives of countless
people around the world, easing innumerable routine tasks they are responsible for. This article offers a
systematic but succinct overview of dementia, and, in this backdrop, explores the potential efficacy of a
proposed intelligent conversation agent aimed at sufficing the fulfilment of the care-associated requirements
of various stakeholders in dementia care. We provide an outline and a critical assessment and suggest future
directions on the adoption of such a tool. We conclude that a smart conversation agent has the potential to
positively overhaul the extant worldwide paradigm of dementia care.
1 INTRODUCTION
Dementia is a broad term. Instead of effectively
referring to a disorder, it describes a set of symptoms
that affect the general functioning of the brain.
Cognitive and motor functions, inter alia, memory,
reasoning, communication, and the ability to perform
daily activities, including motor abilities in the later
stages of the disease, are affected in dementia.
Dementia has many common embodiments.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most frequently occurring
one, with about two-thirds of cases with dementia
presenting with it. Dementia primarily affects older
adults. Notwithstanding this fact, dementia is neither
an inherent part of aging nor is it restricted to
senescent humans. A specific disease called young-
onset dementia (early-onset dementia) exists, and
young-onset Alzheimer’s disease is the most common
form of it (Sim et al., 2022).
a
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-7876-3193
b
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8779-9617
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates
that over 55 million people worldwide are living with
dementia, and the World Alzheimer’s Report, 2009,
estimates that more than 65 million people will be
affected by dementia by 2030 (Gulland, 2012). As the
population ages, the burden of dementia is being felt
not only by those diagnosed and other stakeholders
active (participating) in dementia care (SDCs), but
also our society.
Caring for persons with dementia (PwD)
introduces plentiful challenges, most of which
intensify alongside the progression of the disease.
Dementia affects almost every function of the brain,
from memory and cognition to motor functions and
coordination. PwD may even face sensory struggles
in certain cases (National Institute on Aging, 2023).
The progression of dementia is commonly divided
into three phases, early, middle, and late (Hol et al.,
2024). In the early phase of the disease, PwD
Saxena, R. R. and Khan, A.
Assessing the Practicality of Designing a Comprehensive Intelligent Conversation Agent to Assist in Dementia Care.
DOI: 10.5220/0013191600003911
Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
In Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2025) - Volume 2: HEALTHINF, pages 655-663
ISBN: 978-989-758-731-3; ISSN: 2184-4305
Proceedings Copyright © 2025 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda.
655
experience mild memory lapses and confusion. The
symptoms begin with patients forgetting names and
not being able to recall the task they barely arrived at
a certain location for.
As the severity of the disease advances, its
progression enters the second phase. PwD gradually
start losing the ability to communicate, recognize
loved ones, and carry out basic self-care tasks like
combing their hair and brushing their teeth. Mobility
issues arise in the second phase (middle stage), with
shuffling, hesitation, gait apraxia and festination in
gait becoming apparent (Elble, 2007). In the final
stage, severe cognitive issues are seen, including far-
reaching amnesia with regards to otherwise
effortlessly recognizable faces and objects. Urinary
incontinence and clinical-level mobility issues arise.
The Global Deterioration Scale (GDS), also
known as the Reisberg Scale, is a clinical tool used to
evaluate the progression of cognitive decline in PwD.
This scale categorizes the disease into seven stages
(Dementia Care Central, 2020). There is very slight
overlap between these stages and the phases in the
three-phase model. The Clinical Dementia Rating
(CDR) scale is another tool to assess the severity of
dementia through evaluation of cognitive and
functional performance (Morris, 1993). The stages
are CDR-0 (no impairment), CDR-0.5 (very mild
cognitive decline), CDR-1 (mild cognitive decline),
CDR-2 (moderate cognitive decline), CDR-3
(moderately severe cognitive decline), CDR-4
(severe cognitive decline), CDR-5 (very severe
cognitive decline). These closely correspond to the
GDS stages.
Considerations associated with such progression
places immense emotional, physical, and financial
strain on various SDCs, particularly the family
members and caregivers (Schulz and Sherwood,
2018). They are prone to burnout due to the
demanding and unrelenting nature of the care
required.
Role overload is the psychological feeling
which may be real or perceived of being left
exhausted owing to the duties and demands of
caregiving. Role captivity is the psychological feeling
of being trapped in the role of caregiving and the
resultant erosion of autonomy (Liu et al., 2019). Both
phenomena have a considerable impact on the well-
being of dementia caregivers affecting their mental
health and quality of life (QoL).
Dementia patients face behavioural changes,
such as aggression and wandering off. Caregiver
stress, as explained by the model proposed by
Pearlin et al., has some key factors associated with
it (Pearlin et al., 1990). They include the caregiver’s
personal background and circumstances, including
factors such as the caregiver’s socioeconomic status,
social support networks, and other life stressors; the
demands of the role which exacerbate with the
severity of the patient’s illness; the strains which
arise from the caregiver's other roles and
responsibilities, such as family conflicts, social
isolation and a lack of intermingling with friends,
and financial strain (caregiving might become a full-
time role, or require too much energy, leaving the
caregiver with little or no chance to engage in more
monetarily remunerating employment); and internal
factors such as the caregiver’s own personality (a
caregiver may be timid by nature, or lack the energy
to be an effective caregiver), perceived
incompetence, and other coping mechanisms like
self-pity (by convincing oneself of their role
captivity) (Brodaty and Donkin, 2019).
With these factors in mind, researchers and
healthcare providers enable themselves to empathize
with caregivers. They are, thus, more spurred to
develop useful policies to aid caregivers that mitigate
the negative effects of stress on them.
The healthcare system struggles to meet the needs
of dementia patients. Medical interventions are
largely focused on symptom management and
palliative therapeutics rather than cure (Walsh et al.,
2021). In this context, caregivers, whether informal
ones (Brodaty and Donkin, 2019) or hired
professional aides (Ferretti et al., 2021), have become
cornerstones of patient support. Informal caregivers
are often seen traversing this journey with limited
guidance and respite and may benefit from suitable
training (Birkenhäger‐Gillesse et al., 2020).
The motivation for writing this article stems from
the recognition of these critical challenges and the
urgent need for innovative technological solutions
that can alleviate the burden on not only patients and
their caregivers but also various other SDCs.
AI and NLP applications like chatbots assume the
role of a promising avenue for addressing the needs
of SDCs. Such tools provide aid in daily tasks and
tender cognitive stimulation to PwD, mitigate social
isolation by offering emotional support to those SDCs
who may require it, provide information as instructed
and as necessitated, as also education and edification
to those freshly involved in dementia care or those
already involved in dementia care but participating in
some kind of transition where it behooves them to be
reskilled for continued effective functioning.
However, the development of such tools requires
careful consideration of not only the needs of but also
the challenges faced by SDCs. Most SDCs,
particularly PwD and their caregivers, face unique
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challenges depending on the stage of dementia, and
any solution must account for these differing needs to
be truly effective (Sideman et al., 2022).
2 LITERATURE REVIEW AND
CURRENT APPLICATIONS
A PRISMA-guided literature review was conducted
to mine publications which would help us gather
knowledge regarding what has been done and what is
currently happening within the domain of intelligent
conversation agents being applied to facilitate and
advance dementia care. The systematic screening and
selection processes inherent to PRISMA left us with
a total of 8 articles to be considered, out of the 126 we
began with (Table 1).
T. Igarashi et al. compared the effects of human-
AI interaction on the communication patterns of
elderly people attending community centres and
found that AI-based options can be a viable solution
for routine conversational engagement with
cognitively healthier elderly individuals, that is,
people with early-stage dementia (Igarashi et al.,
2024). F. de Arriba-Pérez et al. used a ML-based
chatbot framework to dynamically predict cognitive
decline (de Arriba-Pérez and García-Méndez, 2024).
M. Boiting et al. have demonstrated a virtual,
interned-based interaction and service framework
that features an embedded chatbot which is intended
to provide organized, comprehensible information to
informal caregivers (Boiting et al., 2024).
C. Müller et al. drew insights from existing
research and from interviews at dementia care
institutions and developed a chatbot prototype to
facilitate facilitates caregiver-patient interaction
(Müller et al., 2022). D. Schmitz and B. Becker have
presented the design of an information platform
accompanied by a chatbot specializing in aiding
informal caregivers (Schmitz and Becker, 2024). M.
R. Lima et al. proposed leveraging an amalgamation
of conversational AI and Internet of Things (IoT) to
monitor older adults, specifically PwD, at home, for
identification of behavioral patterns (Lima et al.,
2023).
Table 1: Literature Review Table.
Author(s) Title Published Brief Description of the Publication
Igarashi et al.
Detailed Analysis of Responses from Older
Adults through Natural Speech:
Com
p
arison of AI vs. Humans
2024
Analyzes older adults’ responses to AI vs.
human interactions in dementia care.
de Arriba-
Pérez &
García-
Méndez
Leveraging Large Language Models
through NLP for Real-Time Mental
Deterioration Predictions
2024
Explores using large language models and
NLP for real-time predictions of mental
deterioration
Boiting et al.
eDEM-CONNECT: An Ontology-Based
Chatbot for Family Caregivers of People
with Dementia
2024
Presents an AI chatbot integrated into the
eDEM-CONNECT platform.
Schmitz &
Becker
Chatbot-Mediated Learning for Caregiving
Relatives of People with Dementia
2024
Investigates chatbot-mediated learning for
dementia caregivers
Lima et al.
Discovering Behavioural Patterns Using
Conversational Technology for In-Home
Health Monitoring
2023
Introduces a cutting-edge IoT and
conversational AI setup
Maia et al.
Empowering Preventive Care with GECA
Chatbot
2023
Introduces the GECA chatbot for preventive
care in dementia
Müller et al. Care: A Chatbot for Dementia Care 2022
Discusses a chatbot which facilitates
caregiver-patient contact
Kouroubali
et al.
Developing an AI-Enabled Integrated Care
Platform for Frailty
2022
Discusses building a care platform for
weakness in dementia
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657
Currently, AI applications like AI-driven serious
games show a massive potential to reform dementia
care. AI-fueled smart conversation agents constitute
one such application. They have the potential to
enhance evidence-based, personalized patient care
plans (Maia et al., 2023). These chatbots can provide
services like medication reminders, automated
symptom tracking, and tailored event tracking and
symptom monitoring support (Clark and Bailey,
2024). They can also act as virtual assistants and
serve as communication bridges between dementia
patients and their caregivers (Müller et al., 2022). A
suitably trained chatbot can act as a virtual listening
ear for PwD to express their needs and emotions
while receiving companionship and emotional
support (Denecke et al., 2021).
AI-driven games are associated with AI-powered
chatbots and contribute to cognitive stimulation of
dementia patients (Irfan et al., 2024). AI (ML)
algorithms are used for early detection of cognitive
decline via analysis of data from sources like
historical data, electronic health records (EHR) and
wearables (Graham et al., 2020). This facilitates early
intervention which, in most cases, is able to arrest the
pace of dementia progression. AI tools can be used
for remote monitoring and continuous observation of
dementia patients. This creates conducive conditions
for the prompt detection of circumstance changes and
administering the necessary interventions (Ahmed et
al., 2020). This also obviates the need for frequent in-
person visits.
3 STAKEHOLDERS IN
DEMENTIA CARE
The list of SDCs begins with PwD themselves, who
vary in their cognitive abilities across the stages of
dementia, their caregivers, who often play a pivotal
role in managing daily routines and medical
appointments, healthcare providers, who must make
informed decisions regarding treatment and symptom
management, grassroots, voluntary, and social care
organizations participating in dementia care,
researchers in dementia care, physiotherapists who
assist with mobility challenges faced by PwD,
policymakers active in the areas of general
healthcare, especially those in mental healthcare, and
technologists who implement solutions based on the
outcomes of researchers’ activities and policymakers’
guidelines.
Pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies,
government agencies involved in funding dementia
research and regulating care services, social workers,
occupational therapists who help patients adapt to
ADLs, speech-language therapists who address
communication and swallowing difficulties,
community organizations which provide respite care,
support groups, and educational programs for
caregivers as well as for PwD, technology
manufacturers who focus on developing assistive
technologies and devices for PwDs, advocacy groups
who raise dementia awareness, nutritionists and
dieticians for PwD, pharmacists who assist caregivers
in managing medications for PwDs, home care
providers who provide in-home assistance with daily
tasks, legal advisors who help families with estate
planning and guardianship (particularly in case of the
families of elderly asset holders with end stage
dementia), advance directives, living wills, medical
power of attorney, and other legal matters and
memory care specialists who deliver specialized care
that is tailored to the unique cognitive needs of
dementia patients, together form a host of varied
stakeholders involved in dementia care, some more
key to the whole enchilada of dementia care, and
some comparatively less. An AI-based solution must
be able to satisfy the needs of these stakeholders to be
termed comprehensive and as a solution oriented
towards a multi-stakeholder view (Patel et al., 2021).
To inform the development of a user-centric
intelligent conversation agent in dementia care, the
needs of SDCs must be enunciated with clarity. Early-
stage PwD would benefit most from a chatbot,
because advanced stage dementia creates hurdles for
PwD (severe cognitive impairment) to efficiently
utilize such technology. PwD in early stages would
benefit from a chatbot that offers cognitive exercises,
serious games, along with comfort, while those in
advanced stages need an agent which could remind
them about daily tasks, warn them not to leave their
homes (for they may lose their way), and respond to
simple cues. The chatbot should be designed to adapt
its conversational style and complexity as dementia
progresses. This would ensure that PwD feel
supported without being overwhelmed and confused.
This adaptability is key to maintaining engagement
and promoting a sense of independence in the early
stages.
Caregivers manage daily routines, medical
appointments, and give emotional support to PwD.
An ideal chatbot must assist a caregiver with tracking
the patient’s symptoms, medication adherence, and
behavior management. It should provide timely
reminders, alert the caregiver to any potential issues,
and offer tailored advice based on the PwD’s current
cognitive state. The chatbot must also provide
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caregivers with educational and stress management
resources which would help them adapt better in their
role as caregivers and improve their skills.
Healthcare providers would find a chatbot that
analyzes, tracks, and presents health-related data to
aid informed decision-making helpful. It should also
provide them with insights from the data about trends
and patterns which would inform their service
delivery and improve it. The AI-solution should
monitor cognitive changes through the linguistic
input by the patient or their caregiver, discerning their
behavior patterns, and predicting any adverse
happening like a reaction to a medication. The system
can transmit, in real-time, the analytics to healthcare
providers, who can opt for the best course of action.
Physiotherapists engaged in dementia care could
need the chatbot to remind PwD to perform their
prescribed exercises and monitor their progress, and
also query it for help in dealing with unique
situations they may not have encountered before, for
example, a person with dementia revulsive to being
touched. With respect to social care organizations,
the AI solution should be able to connect PwD and
their caregivers to local resources, such as support
groups, educational programs, and respite care
services. The AI system must act as a bridge
between these entities and the patients they aim to
help. It should be able to identify the specific needs
of each patient and his or her caregiver and provide
tailored recommendations. It should also facilitate
access to the right resources at the right time.
The chatbot could provide researchers,
technologists, policymakers, and other SDCs, inter
alia pharmaceutical companies, insurance
companies, thinktanks, and advocacy groups, with
resources like insights and cognizant
recommendations based on updated anonymized
data of patients and other sources of relevant
knowledge on dementia care that the underlying
language model has been trained or finetuned on or
has access to through techniques like Retrieval
Augmented Generation (RAG), web scraping, or in-
context learning (ICL). The chatbot itself should
gather data relying on SDCs’ interaction with it; this
data pertains to, among other details, engagement
levels and patient health outcomes. The insights can
inform future research to improve treatment
strategies, developing new medications and
technologies, and designing dementia care policies
and strategies, outreach and marketing plans, and so
on, all of which are aimed at enhancing dementia
care.
4 FULFILLING THE NEEDS OF
SDCs THROUGH AN
AUTOMATED
CONVERSATION AGENT
Chatbots have been operative in the domain of mental
health for a long time. Weizenbaum’s ELIZA (1966)
and Colby’s PARRY (1972) were the earliest
chatbots in this field which were exclusively or
primarily based on rule-based models, that is, they
were preliminary models which relied on predefined
scripts (Saxena, 2024a, 2024b). There are several
types of chatbots that have evolved since then. The
types of chatbots include text-based, speech-based,
and multimodal systems. Text-based chatbots, like
Bard, interact through written text. Speech-based
chatbots, like Alexa and Siri, interact using speech.
Multimodal Chatbots, like Gemini, interact through
multiple modes including text and speech, and can
analyze images, audio, video, tabulated data etc. to
provide insights to the user. Some of them can also
generate data in various formats (multimodal) like
computer programs, audio, video, images, and so on.
We propose the design of a comprehensive
chatbot which can use novel AI techniques to
maximize the fulfillment of the needs of the SDCs.
The chatbot should specialize sufficiently in the
domain of dementia care but not so much that it
overfits and is incapable of processing unique, unseen
conditions or queries, expressly those which are less
directly related to dementia but have a bearing on it.
To build such a chatbot, the underlying model must
have access to diverse data. Exhaustive clinical
datasets which exemplify the various stages of
dementia, including patient profiles categorized by
the stage of dementia, cognitive abilities, memory
retention, speech patterns, motor functions,
behavioral issues like aggression and wandering,
cognitive assessment reports. and interventional
paradigms and medications utilized for patients
clustered based on gender, stage of dementia, age, and
other criteria, along with the evaluated efficacy of the
varied treatment approaches, patient outcomes, and
service utilization rates, must be used.
Access to EHRs, anonymized patient data, and
clinical trial data enable a chatbot to provide data
analytics, real-time insights, and intervention advice.
These insights will include detecting trends in
cognitive function, identifying adverse reactions to
medications, or predicting when interventions might
be necessary. Learning from bulk longitudinal
symptom progression datasets and from detailed
anonymized multi-patient clinical history adequately
Assessing the Practicality of Designing a Comprehensive Intelligent Conversation Agent to Assist in Dementia Care
659
empowers the model to recommend appropriately to
SDCs. Similar comprehensive datasets on caregiver
case studies, trends, patterns, analytics, and insights
on caregiver stress and other aspects associated with
caregivers and PwD, patient-caregiver conversation
transcripts and other transcripts of informative
conversations between various combinations of
SDCs must also be used to train the model. Caregiver
training manuals and comprehensive standardized
training materials commonly used in skilling,
upskilling, and reskilling various other SDCs.
A wide-ranging group of datasets consisting of
dementia- and mental health-related medical and
general texts, articles, chapters, and so on, existing
policies on dementia care, pertinent
recommendations from expert groups and advocacy
groups, publications and research findings, reports
and reviews on dementia, statistics associated with
global, national, and local dementia care data
collection and analytics efforts, industrial data to help
SDCs like pharma and insurance firms, and a
comprehensive description of latest developments
and proposals in the field must also be used during
model development.
To continually improve itself, one of the tactics
that the model must utilize is to augment its
knowledge base by leveraging the context as well as
the prompts provided to it and the queries posed to it.
The PwD’s responses to prompts and frequency of
interactions and inputs from caregivers provide
feedback loops that would refine its interaction. To
improve its comprehensiveness, the chatbot should be
able to process multimodal data inputs. Multimodal
models based on advanced neural networks like
Gated Graph Recurrent Neural Networks (GRNNs),
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), RNNs, and
Transformers must be trained using these multi-
format datasets (Saxena and Saxena, 2024).
5 STRATEGIES THAT MUST BE
APPLIED WHEN BUILDING
THE SPECIALIZED
CONVERSATION AGENT
Domain-specific data collection and curation is an
essential tool to build specialized models. The
language model must be exposed to datasets that are
highly relevant to the field of dementia care as already
described. The language can be pretrained on the data
or can be a preexisting model finetuned on it. In this
way, transfer learning and finetuning become relevant
strategies where we start with an open-source LLM
like Mistral or BERT, which has already been
pretrained on large volumes of general language data.
This model is then finetuned on domain-specific data
related to dementia care to inform an efficient
chatbot. Finetuning allows the model to specialize by
focusing on labeled data. The process adjusts the
model’s internal weights so that it aligns with
dementia-specific requirements.
Prompt engineering can be applied to not only the
already rendered specialized chatbot for more
efficient responses but also to general-purpose
language models to adapt them for specific SDC
needs without retraining the entire model. Prompt
engineering involves users themselves, who must
carefully craft queries and frame with explicitness,
straightforwardness, and elaboration such problems
which will be served as prompts to the chatbot. This
helps an agent generate highly meaningful outputs
which show exceeding appropriateness to the user’s
needs.
Incorporating external knowledge bases also
offers a competent enhancement to the model.
Integrating healthcare ontologies like ICD-10 (Cooke
et al., 2011), dementia-specific databases like
International Alzheimer's Disease Research Portfolio
(IADRP) (Liggins et al., 2014), clinical care
guidelines (Shaji et al., 2018), evidence-based care
guidelines, multi-omics data and so on, associated
with dementia (Saxena et al., 2023), ensures accuracy
and holism in the chatbot’s responses.
Constructing knowledge graphs to represent the
relationships between various concepts and words
that a model is supposed to learn is another way to
train a model of surpassing systematicness. Using
specialized tokenization and vocabulary will help the
chatbot accurately interpret dementia-associated
medical abbreviations and jargon (such as PwD).
Task-specific training objectives enable the model to
focus on specific outcomes important to SDCs (Li et
al., 2020).
Custom loss functions can train an efficient
dementia care model. Active learning and human-in-
the-loop feedback are strategies where experts
periodically review an ML model’s output and
provide constructive feedback which is then used by
technologists to improve the model’s performance
over time.
To keep up with the most updated information
relevant to dementia care and to be resilient to the
evolving nature of the arena, incorporating continual
learning is essential (Wang et al., 2023). Leveraging
RAG is vital in scenarios where real-time, accurate
information is required. A model with the ability to
scrap the web for up-to-the-minute dementia
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research, clinical advances, recommendations,
policy, and technology ensures that newly available
pertinent information can be accessed and processed
as well as integrated into the conversational agent’s
responses.
6 DISCUSSION AND
CHALLENGES
Decision support should be a major aspect of the
chatbot. Systems which offer decision support are
termed clinical decision support systems (CDSSs)
(Bruun et al., 2019). To accelerate the
implementation of anticipatory approaches while
strengthening multimodal and inclusive care for
seniors, shared care planning smoothens
communication between various SDCs. A
multimodal AI model for an efficient paradigm of
dementia care must also incorporate diagnostic
pathology algorithms applicable to dementia,
including computer vision DL algorithms that enable
it to analyze pathological images like MRIs (Saxena
et al., 2019). This augments CDSSs and gives the
underlying model diagnostic capabilities.
A chatbot is an obvious example of the rapidly
burgeoning field of human-machine interaction
(human-computer interaction) (Saxena et al., 2023b).
A major concern in developing a chatbot that is useful
to a broad variety of stakeholders is creating a user-
centric design with a user-friendly interface (Saxena
et al., 2024). Considering the cognitive impairments
associated with dementia, it must be even more
intuitive, facile to navigate, and adaptable to the
varying abilities of its users.
A significant challenge that arises in case of a
complex ML model is its potential lack of
interpretability and explainability. It is vital for
various SDCs to have at least some understanding
regarding how the chatbot arrives at its
recommendations. Clear explanations help build trust
in the system. Ambiguous decisions cause confusion
and may result in misuse of an AI-based system.
Explainable AI techniques (XAI) like LIME and
SHAP should be applied.
Patient data privacy is one of the paramount
concerns in the realm where AI and any aspect of
healthcare or society in general intersect. Ensuring
the anonymity and confidentiality of patient data is
essential to comply with regulations like Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
(HIPAA) and General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR).
The right data is crucial for any ML model to be
trained or finetuned well. So, data availability is
another challenge to consider. In the case of a
comprehensive chatbot in dementia care, there is no
scope for a hallucinatory response to any query,
(hallucination implies the generation of incorrect and
nonsensical responses for queries that the chatbot or
the model is unable to, despite an extensive search
through its vector databases, find a germane answer
to), for misleading and inaccurate outputs may lead to
harmful decisions by SDCs, and may even endanger
lives.
The chatbot must be constantly and efficiently
connected to emergency response services and
healthcare providers. The system must be capable of
expeditiously propagating any warning to emergency
response teams and healthcare professionals in case
PwD encounter any crisis.
7 FUTURE DIRECTIONS AND
CONCLUSION
Dementia is a significant global health issue. The
WHO (2003) reports that dementia accounts for
11.2% of years lived with disability in individuals
past 60 years of age. Dementia has been able to
surpass the impact of global impact of stroke,
cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Advances in AI
over the past few years have demonstrated great
potential for enhancing dementia care and
management.
In this context, The AI-driven intelligent
conversation agent we propose shows promise to
portray the capability to significantly alleviate the
dementia-associated emotional, physical, and
financial burdens that fall on the shoulders of
different SDCs.
However, it must be taken care that such a chatbot
is designed to become progressively better at
accommodating the diverse and evolving needs of
PwD and other SDCs. Simplicity, accessibility, and
adaptability must also be ensured. Efficient
collaboration between various SDCs can lead to the
development of an effective intelligent conversation
agent in dementia care and the resolution of any
roadblocks in its implementation and deployment.
Further future directions include the possible releasing
of the agent as freeware in the best interests of the
society, ensuring continued funding for incremental
enhancements in its performance, and building similar
across-the-board systems for other disciplines in the
field of medicine as well as in other spheres.
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