ChatWise: A Strategy-Guided Chatbot for Enhancing Cognitive Support in Older Adults
This work addresses cognitive support for older adults, offering a novel approach to reduce caregiver overload, though it appears incremental by building on existing chatbot methods with specific enhancements.
The authors tackled the challenge of cognitive health in older adults by proposing ChatWise, a strategy-guided AI chatbot that integrates macro-level strategy planning and micro-level utterance generation for tailored dialogues. Empirical results show it closely aligns with human caregiver behaviors in offline evaluations and significantly outperforms AI baselines in interactive simulations, achieving positive user cognitive and emotional responses.
Cognitive health in older adults presents a growing challenge. Although conversational interventions show feasibility in improving cognitive wellness, human caregiver resources remain overloaded. AI-based chatbots have shown promise, yet existing work is often limited to implicit strategies or heavily depends on training and label resources. In response, we propose a strategy-guided AI chatbot named ChatWise that follows a dual-level conversation reasoning framework. It integrates macro-level strategy planning and micro-level utterance generation to enable engaging, multi-turn dialogue tailored to older adults. Empirical results show that ChatWise closely aligns with professional human caregiver behaviors in offline evaluation using real clinic data, and achieves positive user cognitive and emotional responses in interactive simulations with digital twins, which significantly outperforms AI baselines that follow implicit conversation generation.