ORAL PAPER PRESENTATION 4: INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION
Integrating multiple dialogue agents using WebRTC for facilitating elderly mutual-aid at home
S. Chen, M. Nakamura
Purpose As the number of older people undergoing in-home long-term care increases due to the aging populationworldwide, creating a novel communication between the elderly in different houses (called mutual-aid) has becomea significant challenge to reduce the burden on family caregivers. From traditional Internet of Things (IoT) andInternet Communication Technology (ICT) to Artificial Intelligence (AI), although they have been progressing rapidly
in smart homes and healthcare, there are still many technical tasks to truly realize the elderly mutual-aid at home,such as system operability, acceptability, and affordability. Our interest is to regard the spoken dialogue agent (ananimated chat-bot program with voice interactions) as a virtual caregiver, to make full use of it on a general-purpose
computer to study the assistive technology for older people at home. This study aims to implement an operable andacceptable agent-based communication system that facilitates mutual aid for older people at home. Method Figure
1 shows the system architecture based on the agent communications. Our key idea is to integrate multiple dialogue
agents using Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) technology. The proposed system allows one older
person to video call another specific older person by voice interaction with the dialogue agent. The proposedsystem consists of the following five services, and the key steps include (S4) and (S5) with WebRTC technology.
More specifically, (S1) Agent-ID Management Service: Managing relationships between different agent IDs, such asfriends or family, while ensuring each agent has only one unique ID. (S2) Video-Call Dialogue Scenario: Embedding
video calls into the scenario script of the dialogue agent and allowing older people to call Video-Call Service withpersonalized specific voices. (S3) Video-Call Book Service: Allowing older people to add or remove contacts forvideo-call service by voice interaction with dialogue agent using agent-ID (see S1). (S4) Chat Room Application
Programming Interface (API): Extending a Chat Room API that transfers video and audio streams from the partnerfor embedding dialogue scenarios using WebRTC. (S5) Chat Room Management Service: Monitoring the activity
status (i.e., call free, on a call, or offline) of every agent-ID. Results and Discussion As preliminary studies, wepresented our latest technologies for designing an elderly virtual caregiver (Chen et al., 2021) and the microservice
execution framework (Ozono et al., 2021). We are currently implementing the agent-based communication systemand planning to conduct an experimental evaluation with multiple elderly subjects from viewpoints of operability andacceptability. In the beginning findings, elderly subjects need time to get used to the dialogue agent different fromthe existing phones or smart speakers. Meanwhile, to encourage the elderly to join the dialogue agent, specificpersonal habits (e.g., favorite foods, someone often kept in touch with) should be collected as behavior
inducements. In future work, we will introduce the dialogue agent to the welfare facility or hospital to build andextend the lightweight and convenient remote nursing care networks for individual elders at home.
References
Chen, S., & Nakamura, M. (2021, November). Designing an Elderly Virtual Caregiver Using Dialogue Agents and WebRTC. In
2021 4th International Conference on Signal Processing and Information Security (ICSPIS) (pp. 53-56). IEEE.
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSPIS53734.2021.9652437
Ozono, H., Chen, S., & Nakamura, M. (2021, November). Study of microservice execution framework using spoken dialogue
agents. In 2021 IEEE/ACIS 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking andParallel/Distributed Computing (SNPD) (pp. 273-278). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/SNPD51163.2021.9704889
Keywords: in-home long-term care, spoken dialogue agent, virtual caregiver, WebRTC, mutual aid
Address: Kobe University, 1-1 Rokkodai-cho, Nada, Kobe 657-8501, Japan
Email: chensinan@ws.cs.kobe-u.ac.jp

Figure 1: System Architecture Based on the Agent Communications

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