PhD Candidate: Intelligent Virtual Agent for Empowering People with Dementia

During the dementia-process, people with dementia (PwD) are increasingly in need of social and healthcare support. This may become a heavy burden for informal carers, while care professionals are less available in the current job market. Artificial Intelligence solutions, such as social agents and robots, offer promising opportunities to alleviate some of this burden.
As a PhD candidate on this project you will therefore contribute to the development of a ‘social agent and robot’ (SAR) framework that aims at an optimal Quality of Life by contributing to the experienced autonomy, sense of meaning in life and self-esteem of an older PwD using an empowerment approach being published shortly. Its personalised, enduring and adaptive support is intended to improve over time, based on data-driven learning technologies, and will include a virtual conversational agent that supports PwD in their daily activities and social relations. A first version of a virtual agent for supporting older adults has been developed and tested. In addition to the conversational agent technology, the envisioned framework includes cloud computing, game development, machine learning, symbolic modelling and reasoning, and home automation and/or wearable sensing devices. These technologies will be advanced and combined, in co-creation with stakeholders, into a SAR framework for ’blended’ network care (i.e. care from informal and professional carers, supported by social AI). Your teaching load may be up to 10% of your appointment.

A description of the project is available upon request.