A home health care system for elderly people

The aging of the population in Japan is proceeding more rapidly than in other countries. Under this circumstances, an advent of home health care supporting system is desired strongly. This paper introduces a research project about a home health care system for elderly. The targets of this system are aged people who live alone with comparatively good health condition. In order to monitor their daily health condition, the system executes medical checks through some examinations and conversations. By generating appropriate dialogue plan in collaborating with a medical expert program, the system performs an efficient discourse reducing redundant or needless interactions. Additionally, to enable a human-computer interaction closer to human-human interaction under illcondition environment, this system has an audio-visual dialogue interface. This paper describes the strategy of dialogue-plan generation and its man-machine interface, and presents the current results for dialogue experiments.