Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life
Vol. 5(3); December (2018), pp. 153–156
DOI: 10.2991/jrnal.2018.5.3.2; ISSN 2405-9021 print; 2352-6386 online
https://www.atlantis-press.com/journals/jrnal

Research Article

Cognitive Content Generation for Healthy Ageing
Yuki Hayashi1,*, Akinori Abe2,†
Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Chiba University, Inage-ku, Chiba-shi, Chiba 261-0004, Japan
Faculty of Letters, Chiba University, Inage-ku, Chiba-shi, Chiba 261-0004, Japan

12ARTICLE INFOABSTRACTArticle History

From the viewpoint of preventing dementia, balanced meal, moderate exercise, intellectual activities and social interaction
are important. We considered shopping activities were proper to encourage those factors because the activities wereintellectual in human daily activities. In this paper, we are going to construct Shopping Game and discuss how to evaluate
the activities in the game from the viewpoint of preventing dementia. In addition, we will discuss content generation in
Shopping Game.

Received 17 May 2018
Accepted 11 November 2018
Keywords
Prevention of dementia
shopping activities
Shopping Gamecontent generation© 2018 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

1. INTRODUCTION

2. METHOD - SHOPPING GAME

Dementia is a general term for a decline in mental ability enoughto interfere with daily life. Alzheimer’s is the most common type ofdementia. Otake [1] pointed out balanced meal, moderate exercise,
intellectual activities and social interaction were important fromthe viewpoint of preventing dementia. In addition, as people getolder, physical activities decrease because of retirement, bereavement, and so on [2].

In many researches about consumer behavior [5–7], they usuallyobserve consumers in a real grocery shop. However, this way ofobservation may be difficult for observers and for participants. Abe
said that “The way of observation in my research requires lots oftime and labor, so it is difficult to collect lots of shopping activities data.” [7]. Accordingly, we developed Shopping Game. In addition, especially in urban areas in Japan, there are many people who
do not have any grocery stores around their houses [8]. So online
shopping services have also been demanded.

We considered shopping activities were proper to encourage thosefactors because the activities were intellectual in human daily
activities. Shopping activities are one of the daily activities andpeople should do that usually by themselves. Some people visit
a real grocery store and the others use online store or delivery
service (e.g., COOP). In addition, convenient stores are visited not
only by the young and also by the elderly in Japan [3], so shopping
activities are one of the essential daily activities for many people.
Therefore, in the situation of shopping activities, we thought wecould activate intellectual activities to prevent dementia. In addition, we have to take psychological stress into consideration. Oneof the solutions is gamification. Gamification is a method whichapplies some ingredients or ideas in the field of game to the otherfield [4]. For example, gamification is used for rehabilitation orlearning support.
In this paper, we construct Shopping Game and discuss how toevaluate the activities in the game from the viewpoint of preventing dementia. In addition, we will discuss content generation inShopping Game.
* Corresponding author. Email: yu751@outlook.jp†Present address: DWANGO Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan

In this game, user can move a character and walk around virtualstore (Figure 1). Upper part means a basket which the characterhas and lower part means a floor in the virtual store. If user wants
a particular item, he/she can drag the picture of item from floor tobasket. On the other hand, if user stops purchasing an item, he/shecan drag the picture of item from basket to floor. There are many
areas in the store, for example, vegetables, bakery or snacks. Whena character approaches a certain area, user can see information oneach item, which information fundamentally consists of name,amount and price.
Participants were 34 people, and 12 of them were house-workers,
11 were boarders and 11 were home-students. They can play thegame depending on their purposes. They often told us some comments. So we recorded their activities and utterances.

3. RESULTS
As shown in Figure 2, participant (A) has a stickle preference
to a specific item (milk-X). You can see that the specific item154

Y. Hayashi and A. Abe / Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life 5(3) 153–156

Figure 1 | The structure of Shopping Game

[In front of beverage area] I see … oh, I want milk-X. milk …
My family like milk-X. We will not purchase the others. I know
milk-X is more expensive than the others, but milk-Y is notbetter than milk-X … meat … [She gave up to purchase beef atmeat area previously] I chose pork and saved my money. So I
can spend my money on milk!
Figure 2 | The utterances of participant (A)activated utterances. In addition, a choice of milk was caused bya choice of meat. This participant showed her ability of budget
management Participant (B) was house-worker and (C) was herdaughter (Figure 3). They discuss which vegetables are good foryakisoba. In this case, they could not find a noodle for yakisoba inthe end, so they planned to purchase a noodle at the other shop.
When our participants play the game, they showed some types ofutterances/conversation. We summarized intellectual activities ofour participants into Table 1. This game will be used as the following purposes. To prevent dementia, cognitive functions would betrained. In the future, evaluation of cognitive functions would
be also added. The game would be useful to activate a communication. Otake said “The shortage of social communication is oneof the main factor of dementia” [9]. So we plan to make a situation
where some users can simultaneously play the game to communicate with each other.

4. DISCUSSION - SHOPPING GAME WITH
CONTENT GENERATIONIn the future, Shopping Game has to change its contents automatically depending on its user. Some functions will be added to theShopping Game. From the viewpoint of cognitive training, out ofstock and change of price are needed. In addition, it is good for user
to be sometimes shown some special items with discount or withbest season. Furthermore, other shoppers would influence on user

Y. Hayashi and A. Abe / Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life 5(3) 153–156

B:	What’s best for our lunch? … ok, let’s cook yakisoba. First,I need green peppers …
C: Why?? [She dislikes green pepper]
B: I also need a cabbage.
C: How about carrots?
B: Carrots remain in a refrigerator.
B: oh … where is noodle [for yakisoba]?? This shop doesn’t
have one??
B: Now, let’s drop in at Shop-P in our way to home. [She saidto her daughter] Just remember it!
C: Shop-P?

Figure 3 | The utterances of participants (B) and (C)Table 1 | A list of units observed in shopping activities
ClassSymbolNoticen1n2nc

Resultr+1
r0
r−1

Knowledge

PlanningIdea

so some virtual shoppers which move automatically are needed in
the virtual store.
Recently, healthy ageing has been an important concept todecrease risk of disease, care independence or any other troubles.
For example, WHO has recommended healthy lifestyle to younger
and middle-aged people. In addition, a concept “ME-BYO” which
was originally generated in oriental medicine has been acceptedaround the world. This concept means inarticulate zone between
health and disease and encourages healthy life style. So preventing dementia is the problem not only for the elderly but also forthe young or middle-aged people. We have to enhance our gametaking diversity of users into account.

5. CONCLUSION

B: Yes, I don’t want to change my plan [to cook yakisoba]. If I
do so, I should return all these vegetables to vegetable area.
It’s troublesome!!

Search155

s1
s2
s3
s4
s5
k1
k2
k3
k4
k5
k6
k7
k8
k9
k10
p1
p2
p3
p4
p5
p6
p7
p8
i1
i2
i3
i4

ActivityTo simply notice an item
To find an item which a shopper wanted
To notice an item which a shopper has
already noticed
To put an item into a shopping cart
Not to put an item into a shopping cart
To move an item from a shopping cart to aselling zone
To search some items in a store
To search some items in a selling zone
To notice or find a selling zone
To arrive at a selling zone
To move toward a checkout counter
Price or market price of an item
Producing area of an item
The best season for an item
Freshness of an item
Use of an item
Characteristics of an item
Family’s preferences
Arrangement in a store
Stock in a store
Evaluation on a store
To check a shopping cart
To check sequence during shopping
activities
To check a shopper’s plan
To consider a shopper’s plan
To adjust balance of items
To manage a shopper’s budget
To recall stock in a shopper’s house
To predict stock in a shopper’s house
To compare an item with the others
To combine an item with the others
To use an item as other purpose
To substitute an item for the other item

In this paper, we constructed Shopping Game for healthy ageing
and discussed how to evaluate the activities in the game from theviewpoint of preventing dementia. We conducted observations todetermine if the shopping activities were really intelligent activities and we showed some examples of utterances/conversations in
shopping activities. Our participants talked actively, for example,
when they found their favorite items in a grocery store, when theycomplain about price and when they let the other participants know
useful information. Accordingly, we think we can activate utterances/conversations if we give a topic about shopping to people inShopping Game. In the future, we consider it will be also used forevaluation of cognitive functions so we have to make a criteria forusers’ performance.

REFERENCES[1] M. Otake, Conversation support robot for promoting cognitive
activity of older adults, J. Japanese Soc. Artif. Intell. 29 (2014),
591–598.
[2] Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Healthy Japan 21(Physical Activities and Sports), http://www1.mhlw.go.jp/topics/
kenko21_11/b2.html, 4/19/2015 reference, 2015 (in Japanese).
[3] The graph of people visiting convenient stores, http://www.garbagenews.net/archives/1953464.html, 2014 (in Japanese).
[4] S. Deterding, M. Sicart, L. Nacke, K. Ohara, D. Dixon,Gamification: using game-design elements in non-gaming contexts. Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Conference Extended
Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA’11),
Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2011, pp. 2425–2428.
[5] J. Rosen, A. Turano, Stopwatch Marketing: Take Charge of theTime When Your Customer Decides to Buy, Emerald Group
Publishing Limited, 2008.
[6] M. Matsushita, K. Hamatani, H. Nitto, Why don’t Japanese people
purchase commodity?, Toyo Keizai Inc, 2013.
[7] S. Abe, Shopping activities and information processing - atrial of protocol analysis, Yokohama Manage, Study 4 (1984),33–48.
[8] The Mainichi, Shopping Refugees in Urban Areas, A Morning
Edition of the Mainichi, 2014.
[9] M. Otake, Coimagination Method for Nursing Care, Chuohoki
Publishing Co., Ltd., 2011.

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Authors Introduction
Mr. Yuki Hayashi

Dr. Akinori Abe

He graduated Master course at
Humanities and Social Sciences ofChiba University in 2017. His main
research interests are developmental psychology, cognitive science,narratology and human behaviorand language. He is a member ofIEEE, JSAI (The Japanese Society
for Artificial Intelligence), JCSS(Japanese Cognitive Science Society),
IPSJ (Information Processing Societyof Japan) and CIHCD (The Society of Citizen Informatics for
Human Cognitive Disorder).

He received an M.E. and Doctorof Engineering (PhD) from theUniversity of Tokyo in 1988 and1991 respectively. His main researchinterests are abduction, analogical reasoning, data mining, Chance
Discovery and language sense processing (rather emotional aspectsof language processing). He worked
in NTT Communication Science
Laboratories from 1991 to 2000,
NTT MSC (Malaysia) from 2000 to 2002, and ATR from 2002
to 2009. He also worked as an associate professor of IREIIMS,Tokyo Women’s Medical University and a visiting associate
professor of Kobe University Graduate School (CooperationCourse). In 2009 he returned to NTT Communication Science
Laboratories. Then he moved to Faculty of Letters, Chiba
University in April 2012. Since then he is a full professor ofChiba University.