DEVELOPING ELDERLY STRESS-RELIEFSERVICE USING PERSONALIZED VIDEOSAND SPOKEN DIALOGUE AGENT
Hiro Horie1, Sinan Chen1, Masahide Nakamura1, 2
and Kiyoshi Yasuda3
1

Kobe University, 1-1 Rokkodai-cho, Nada, Kobe, 657-8501, JapanRIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, 1-4-1 Nihonbashi, Chuoku, Tokyo, 103-0027, Japan
3
Osaka Institute of Technology 5-16-1 Omiya, Asahi-ku,
Osaka, 535–8585 Japan

2

ABSTRACT
Our research group is conducting research of a system to support the lives of the elde rly athome. We developed “Rakuraku Video Service"(Rakuraku means easy.), a service thatobtains information on the interests and preferences of elderly people and recommends
YouTube videos based on this information. The purpose of this service is to help the elderly
relieve stress and relax by watching videos. However, it has not been tested yet whether thisservice has such an eﬀect on the elderly. We conduct an experiment to evaluate the service. In
conducting the experiment, we will collaborate with a previous study, “PC-Mei" which aims
to watch over the elderly and support their daily lives with a virtual agent. The experiment
was conducted to obtain evaluations of watched videos and a questionnaire. From theresults, it is clear that the service is useful in relieving stress among theelderly.

KEYWORDS
Elderly at home, watching videos, stress relief, individual adaptive type, spoken dialogue
agent.

1. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, Japan’s population has been aging, and the country is facing a super-aged society.
As a result, the number of people requiring nursing care has been increasing, but a shortage ofnursing care workers has become an issue. In response to this problem, the government is working
to establish a comprehensive community care system that allows elderly people to continue tolive in their own neighborhoods even after they require nursing care. One of these eﬀorts is theestablishment of a system of home nursing care and home medical care. As a result, the number of
elderly people living at home is expected to increase in the future.
Our research group has been developing a system to watch over elderly people at home [1][2] [3] [4]. In our previous research, we have been working on the development of the “Rakuraku
Video Service" (Rakuraku means easy.) [5] [6] [7], which aims to relieve the stress of the elderly.
Rakuraku Video Service is a service that recommends YouTube videos suited to individuals basedon their answers to a questionnaire about their interests and preferences. The screen is designed soDavid C. Wyld et al. (Eds): ICCSEA, NLAI, SCAI, CSIA, IBCOM, SEMIT, NECO, SPPR, MLDS -2023
pp. 01-11, 2023. CS & IT - CSCP 2023
DOI: 10.5121/csit.2023.132401

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that even the elderly, who are not good at operating digital devices, can easily operate the service.
The aim of this service is to provide users with stress relief and relaxation by watching videos
that suit their personal preferences. Preliminary experiments with faculty members and students
belonging to our research group have conﬁrmed that this service can recommend videos suited toindividual users, but the eﬀect on the elderly has not yet been veriﬁed.
In this paper, we conduct a demonstration experiment of Rakuraku Video Service for the elderlyand
evaluate the service. The following research questions are set for the veriﬁcation experiment.
– RQ1 ：Can the service recommend videos that match the interests and tastes of the elderly?
– RQ2 ：Is the service easy for the elderly to operate?
– RQ3 ：Can the elderly relieve stress by watching videos recommended by the service?
The experiment targets three elderly people in their 70s to 80s, and the duration is two weeks.
In order to conduct the experiment, we collaborated with PC-Mei [8] [9], a system that uses a
spoken dialogue agent to support the monitoring of daily life. Subjects are asked to invoke and use
Rakuraku Video Service by voice operation of PC-Mei. The service was evaluated by evaluating
the recommended videos and by a questionnaire after the experiment. The results showed that thesystem can recommend videos that match the interests and preferences of the elderly, that theoperation is easy for the elderly, and that viewing the recommended videos has a stress-relieving
eﬀect. On the other hand, it was also found that there is room for improvement in the video
recommendation algorithm and operation method. Future tasks are to improve the system andconduct experiments with a larger number of subjects.

2. P RELIMINARIES
2.1. The Elderly and Stress
The world’s population aging rate is currently rising; in 2020, it was 9.3%, and it is expected torise to 17.8% by 2060. By country, Japan currently has the highest rate of aging. 28.9% of the
population will be elderly in 2021, and the country is entering a hyper-aged society.
While the number of people requiring nursing care is rising with the aging of society, there is a
shortage of nursing care workers. In response, the government is working to build a comprehensive
community care system that allows elderly people to continue to live their own lives in their own
neighborhoods until the end of their lives, even if they require nursing care. One of these eﬀorts isthe establishment of a system of home nursing care and home medical care. Therefore, the numberof homebound elderly people is expected to increase in the future. Long time spent at home may
cause stress due to loneliness and worries about life and health. While living at home, homeboundelderly people need to engage in self-care to relieve their own stress without placing a burden on
their families and caregivers.

2.2. Preceding Research: Rakuraku Video Service
Our research group has been conducting research and development of a system to watch over andsupport elderly people at home. We are developing a “Rakuraku Video Service"（Figure 1,
Figure 2）[5] [6] [7] to relieve the stress of elderly people at home. This service recommends
personalized YouTube videos based on the user’s interests and preferences obtained throughquestionnaires, and aims to relieve stress and relax the user by having him or her watch them.
The screen is designed to be easy to operate, even for those who are not good at operating digitalComputer Science & Information Technology (CS & IT)

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devices. The service has the following three functions.
Video playback function This section describes a function that automatically plays videos on
YouTube sequentially when a list of videos is given. When a list of videos and a user are registeredwith the service, a URL for playing the videos is generated for each user. Users can access the URL tostart viewing the videos. The video playback screen is shown in Figure 1.

Fig. 1. Rakuraku Video Service (video playback screen)

Video list creation function This section describes the functionality used to create a list ofvideos tailored to the user’s tastes and preferences. First, we obtain information on users’ tastes
and preferences using paper media and Google Forms. The questionnaire includes “favorite places
and places to visit", “favorite music (singers and songs)", “favorite sports and athletes", “favorite
celebrities", “hobbies", “favorite TV and radio", and “old favorites and other interests". Eachanswer is entered into the service as a search word for YouTube videos, and the search programautomatically searches for videos that match the individual’s preferences. The searched videos
satisfy the following conditions.
– Video must be within the top 5 videos related to the search term in order of number ofviewsand relevance.
– Video must have at least 10,000 views on YouTube– Video length must be less than 20 minutes.
The limitation by the number of views was established because preliminary experiments conductedwith faculty members and students in the research group revealed that videos with fewer views
tended to be rated lower by users. A limit on the length of videos is set because we believe that elderly
people will not be able to concentrate for long periods of time. Searched videos are automaticallyregistered with the service. The service also selects ﬁve registered videos and registers them asa
list. The videos selected are one from each genre (singers, sports, hobbies, etc.). When a user
ﬁnishes watching one list, a new list of videos is automatically registered.
Eﬀectiveness measurement function This section describes the function for measuring the impact ofvideo viewing on the elderly. The purpose of this service is to relieve stress, but since it is diﬃcult toactually measure the degree of stress relief, this service obtains subjective evaluations of videos.
Immediately after viewing a video, users are asked to rate the video in 5 levels: “Interesting",“Slightly Interesting", “Neutral", “Not Very Interesting", and "Not Interesting" by pressing a rating
button. The video evaluation screen is shown in Figure 2. In addition, facial expression recognition
during video viewing is used to provide an objective evaluation of the video. Facial expression

4Computer Science & Information Technology (CS & IT)recognition captures changes in facial expression by capturing the width of the mouth and the
movement of the eyes. However, in this experiment, facial expression recognition is not performed forthe sake of subject privacy.

Fig. 2. Rakuraku Video Service (video evaluation screen)

Fig. 3. PC-MeiCopyright 2009-2018 Nagoya Institute of Technology (MMDAgent Model “Mei ” )2.3. Preceding Research: Pc-Mei.Our research group has been developing PC-Mei ( Figure 3 ) [8] [9], a system that uses a spoken
dialogue agent to support the monitoring of the elder ly in thei r daily lives. In the previous study,
we developed a service voice execution function that enables PC-Mei to execute various serviceson the Web as an extension of this system. The system executes services when an elderly person
utters speciﬁc keywords. Examples include a search service that performs Web searches using
keywords and a weather forecast service that tells the user the weather forecast. This function
allows the elderly to easily use Web services by voice without complicated device operations

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2.4. Linking PC-Mei with Rakuraku Video Service
To link the previous studies, we register Rakuraku Video Service to PC-Mei’s service voice
execution function. This allows users to easily access the service startup screen by saying “Rakuraku
Video Service" to the PC-Mei agent. The ﬁgure 4 shows the overall architecture after the linking.

Fig. 4. Overall Architecture

Rakuraku Video Service manages and plays videos, and PC-Mei calls and displays the video
playback screen.

2.5. Issues to Focus on
We have conducted preliminary experiments on Rakuraku Video Service with faculty members
and students belonging to our research group, and veriﬁed that the service can recommend videos
that match individual tastes and preferences. However, it has not yet been veriﬁed whether therecommendation of preferred videos to the elderly can relieve stress and relax them. In this paper,
we propose to investigate the impact of this service on the elderly, and conduct a demonstration
experiment on the elderly as a research method.

3. EXPERIMENT
3.1. Purpose of Experiment
The purpose of this experiment is to evaluate Rakuraku Video Service through an experimenttargeting elderly people. The following research questions were set up for the evaluation.
– RQ1：Can the service recommend videos that match the interests and tastes of the elderly?
– RQ2：Is the service easy for the elderly to operate?
– RQ3 ：Can the elderly relieve stress by watching videos recommended by the service?

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3.2. Method of ExperimentThis experiment will be conducted with three elderly subjects in their 70s and 80s, and a PC-Mei
system linked to Rakuraku Video Service will be installed in each of their homes. The subject
Table 1. Subject Information

used the service by saying "Rakuraku Video Service" to PC-Mei at any time during a two-weekperiod.
The experimental procedure is as follows.
：

Step 1 : The subject’s basic information (name, etc.) is registered with Rakuraku Video
Service and PC-Mei.
Step 2 ：The PC-Mei (laptop computer) is installed in the subject’s home.
Step 3 ：A questionnaire regarding the subjects’ hobbies and preferences is administered
Step 4 ：Enter the answers to the questionnaire into Rakuraku Video Service and run thevideo search program
Step 5 ：The subject says "Rakuraku Video Service" to the PC-Mei agent at an arbitrary time
Step 6 ：Subjects watch ﬁve videos at a time and rate each video on a ﬁve-point scale.
Step 7 ：The service updates the video list when the viewing of a video is ﬁnished.
Step 8：Perform Step 5 to Step 7 for 2 weeks.
Step 9 : The system is collected and a post-experiment questionnaire is administered.
The post-experiment questionnaire asks the following questions. Except for Question 6, theanswers were selected from 1 to 4 (1: not applicable, 2: not very applicable, 3: a little applicable,
and 4: applicable). The respondents are also asked to provide reasons for each answer, if any
Questionnaire after the experiment– Q1：I had a good time using this service.
– Q2：I felt nostalgic using this service.
– Q3：I felt the eﬀects of stress reduction and relaxation by using this service.
– Q4：This service was easy to operate.
– Q5：I would like to use it again if I have a chance.
– Q6：Please write down any improvements or comments.

4. R ESULTS
The table 2 shows the number of times each subject used Rakuraku Video Service and the numberof videos viewed. 3 subjects used the service a total of 21 times and viewed 47 diﬀerent videos.

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Although 5 videos were played back per use, only 47 diﬀerent videos were viewed as a result
because the videos were selected at random from among the videos searched for, resulting in thesame video being viewed multiple times.
Table 2. Experimental results: Number of times used

The table 3 shows the results of the subjects’ evaluations of the videos (the number of each
evaluation). When the same video was viewed and evaluated multiple times, the results are shownfor the ﬁrst viewing. 22 videos were interesting, 8 were lightly interesting, 10 were neutral, 3 were
not very interesting, and 4 were not interesting for all three subjects.
Table 3. Experimental results: Evaluation for videos(unit: number of videos)

Table 4. Post-experiment questionnaire results(Refer to Step 9 of the Method of Experiment for the selection scale of 1 to 4.)

5. DISCUSSION
5.1. Discussion of RQ1
In order to examine whether or not the service was able to recommend videos that matched thetastes and preferences of the elderly, we assigned a score to the evaluation given to each video.
We assign a score of -2 points to “Not Interesting", -1 point to "Not Very Interesting", 0 points
to "Neutral", 1 point to “Slightly Interesting", and 2 points to “Interesting". From the table 3, the8Computer Science & Information Technology (CS & IT)

average score of the 47 videos viewed and evaluated was calculated to be 0.87, which was closer
to “Interesting" than to "Neutral". Thus, for RQ1, we conﬁrmed that Rakuraku Video Service iscapable of recommending videos that match the interests and tastes of the elderly.

5.2. Discussion of RQ2
The results of Q4 of the post-experiment questionnaire are discussed in terms of whether theoperation was easy for the elderly. One subject answered "not very applicable" to the questionof whether the operation was easy. The subject stated that the buttons were easy to understand,although he felt uneasy when he pressed diﬀerent buttons (in unrelated places). The remaining two
subjects answered “a little applicable” and “applicable,” conﬁrming that the current screen designand operation methods are easy for the elderly, although there is room for improvement.

5.3. Discussion of RQ3
The results of Q1, Q2, and Q3 of the post-experiment questionnaire will be used to determine
whether viewing the recommended videos relieves stress in the elderly. All subjects answered that
Q1 (I had a good time using this service.) was applicable or a little applicable. Regarding Q3 (Ifelt the eﬀects of stress reduction and relaxation by using this service.), two out of three subjects
answered applicable. The above results conﬁrm that using RakuRaku Video Service makes the users
feel happy, stress-relieving, and relaxing. However, one subject said that they were disappointed
with the advertisements, indicating that the video search program needs to be improved. Q2 (I felt
nostalgic using this service.) was set as a question in the post-experiment questionnaire because wethought that if there were things from the past in the answers to the questionnaire about interestsand preferences, videos that made the participants feel nostalgic would be recommended. Oneof the methods of dementia care is reminiscence [10], which aims for psychological stability byreminding people of the past. We expected a relaxing eﬀect of nostalgia based on this method, andit
can be said that it had that eﬀect only on Subject C. We believe that this eﬀect can be improved in
the future by asking about past events in more detail during the questionnaire.

5.4. Discussion of Video Evaluation
We investigated what genres of videos were likely to receive good evaluations. Here, as shown in
the table 5, we consider the survey items related to tastes and preferences as seven genres.
Table 5. Dividing into genres

The table 6 shows the results (rounded to two decimal places) of calculating the percentage ofratings for each genre. (e.g. The genre "Place" was watched three times in total, and two were rated
as interesting. Therefore, the ratio is 2 3 ≒ 0.67)
÷The table 6 shows that music, celebrity, and program were highly rated as interesting or slightlyinteresting. This is thought to be due to the fact that the answers to the questionnaires for the interests

Computer Science & Information Technology (CS & IT)

9and tastes are concrete names and proper nouns, and therefore, videos that match individual tastes
are easily recommended. On the other hand, a high percentage of respondents rated sport videos asneutral, not very interesting, or not interesting. This is thought to be due to the fact that even whensearching for videos on a single sport, there are so many diﬀerent types of videos that it is unlikelythat a video suited to the individual will be recommended. The same can be said for hobby, whichhave a large variation in evaluation. For other genres, the number of videos viewed was small, soit
is necessary to conduct experiments with a larger number of subjects.
Table 6. Percentage of evaluation by genre

Future issues
As mentioned in the discussion above, future issues are to improve the screen design so that eventhose who are not familiar with the operation of digital devices can clearly understand how to
operate them, and to conduct the experiment with a larger number of subjects. In addition, since
there were cases in which the same video was viewed multiple times in this experiment, it isnecessary to modify the video recommendation algorithm in order to recommend diﬀerent videos.

6. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we conducted a demonstration experiment with elderly people to evaluate Rakuraku
Video Service that helps elderly people relieve stress. From the experimental results, we conﬁrmedthat the service can recommend videos that match the interests and tastes of the elderly, that it iseasy to operate, and that it can help them relieve stress. We also conﬁrmed that the evaluation of
the service is biased depending on the genre of the videos.
The issues found in the experiment are to design a screen that is easier to understand theoperation method, to improve the video recommendation algorithm, and to conduct an experimentwith a larger number of subjects. The service will be improved based on the results of thisexperiment. This will enable elderly people at home to easily watch videos that match theirinterests and tastes, and is expected to help them relieve stress.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP19H01138,
JP20H05706, JP20H04014, JP20K11059, JP22H03699, JP19K02973, and Young Scientists(No.23K17006).

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[1]

AUTHORS
Hiro Horie received the B.E. degree in Information and Intelligence Engineering from Kobe University,
Japan, in 2022. He is currently enrolled in a master’s course at the Graduate School of Systems
Informatics, Kobe University, Japan. His research interests include the Web service and gerontechnology.
Sinan Chen received a Master of system informatics and a Ph.D. in computational science from Kobe
University, Japan, in 2019 and 2021, respectively. He worked at Kobe University as a research fellow (PD)from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) in the ﬁrst half of 2022. He is currently an
assistant professor in the Center of Mathematical and Data Science Center at Kobe University, Japan. His
research interests include the smart home, cloud computing, machine learning, and software engineering.
He is a member of the IEEE, ACM, Sigma Xi, CAAI, CCF, IEICE, and IEEJ.
Masahide Nakamura received the B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees in Information and Computer Sciencesfrom Osaka University, Japan, in 1994, 1996, 1999, respectively. From 1999 to 2000, he has been a postdoctoral fellow in SITE at University of Ottawa, Canada. He joined Cybermedia Center at Osaka
University from 2000 to 2002. From 2002 to 2007, he worked for the Graduate School of Information

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Science at Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan. From 2007 to 2022, he worked for the
Graduate School of System Informatics at Kobe University. He is currently a full professor in the Center ofMathematical and Data Science Center at Kobe University. In 2015, he worked for Universite Grenoble
Alpes as a visiting professor. In 2018, he joined RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project as avisiting researcher. His research interests include the service/cloud computing, smart home, smart city, andgerontechnology. He is a member of the IEEE, ACM, IEICE and IPSJ.
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Attribution (CC BY) license.