Eldertainment or functional necessity? How virtual agents affect the home lives of people with dementia using the quality of life (QoL-AD) scale

De Jong, Michiel; Hettinga, Marike; Stara, Vera; Evers, Vanessa; Li, Jamy

Abstract

A large literature evaluates how virtual agents impact the lives of people with dementia using perceptions of technology. We assess how a home virtual agent from "Living Well with Anne" impacts the quality of life of elderly with dementia rather than only their perceptions of the technology. Assessing impact on life alongside technology perception is pertinent given the importance of a person's perceived quality of daily home life and that positive technology perception does not always lead to actual use. We propose an approach to evaluate assistive technology for elderly people with dementia by assessing impact on life using semi-structured interviews and the QOL-AD scale. A preliminary proof-of-concept study tests whether perceptions of a virtual agent, actual use of the agent and participants' quality of life are related, and whether a virtual agent improves quality of life.

Citation

De Jong, M., Hettinga, M., Stara, V., Evers, V., & Li, J. (2019, September). Eldertainment or functional necessity? How virtual agents affect the home lives of people with dementia using the quality of life (QoL-AD) scale. Presented at UbiComp '19: The 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, London, UK

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: UbiComp '19: The 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing
• Start Date: Sep 9, 2019
• End Date: Sep 13, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Sep 9, 2019
• Publication Date: 2019
• Deposit Date: May 7, 2024
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 41-44
• Book Title: UbiComp/ISWC 2019- - Adjunct Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers
• ISBN: 9781450368698
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3341162.3343827