A Review of Challenges in Speech-based Conversational AI for Elderly Care
This work addresses the problem of improving elderly care through AI, but it is incremental as it reviews existing challenges without proposing new solutions.
The paper reviews the challenges in deploying speech-based conversational AI for elderly care, highlighting that research on practical efficacy and user experience is limited, and identifies key user- and technology-centered issues that must be addressed for effective implementation.
Artificially intelligent systems optimized for speech conversation are appearing at a fast pace. Such models are interesting from a healthcare perspective, as these voice-controlled assistants may support the elderly and enable remote health monitoring. The bottleneck for efficacy, however, is how well these devices work in practice and how the elderly experience them, but research on this topic is scant. We review elderly use of voice-controlled AI and highlight various user- and technology-centered issues, that need to be considered before effective speech-controlled AI for elderly care can be realized.