Osmar Zaïane, Amii Fellow at the University of Alberta, is leading a team to improve elder care using machine intelligence.

Canada is facing an aging population. It’s expected that by 2030, 23% of Canadians will be seniors. Additionally, according to Statistics Canada, as many as 1.4 million seniors report feeling lonely. These stats indicate a looming impact on individuals, families and society at large, as feelings of loneliness are associated with higher levels of mental and physical health problems.

Enter the Automated Nursing Agent or Ana, a conversational software agent (i.e. chatbot) designed to converse with elderly individuals living at home. The model, which was explored in a recently published study, aims to ease loneliness in seniors using emotionally intelligent conversations.

“When an elderly person tells you something that’s sad, it’s important to respond with empathy,” said Zaïane in an interview with Folio. “That requires that the device first understand the emotion that is expressed. We can do that by converting the speech to text and looking at the words that are used. In this study, we looked at the next step: having the program express emotions—like surprise, sadness, happiness—in its response.”

Working as both a personal assistant and a digital companion, Ana will build a knowledge base of personalized facts and memories (such as important people, places, activities and prescriptions), carry on engaging conversations that express and respond to emotions, and also answer impersonal questions from sources on the Internet. This will give Ana the ability to not only fulfill social needs, but also assist with simple home healthcare needs such as prescription reminders.

The team is currently working on improving their limited prototype.