Listener agent for elderly people with dementia

With the goal of developing a conversational humanoid that can serve as a companion for people with dementia, we propose an autonomous virtual agent that can generate backchannel feedback, such as head nods and verbal acknowledgement, on the basis of acoustic information in the user´s speech. The system is also capable of speech recognition and language understanding functionalities, which are potentially useful for evaluating the cognitive status of elderly people on a daily basis.