GRACE: Towards an Embodied Voice Assistant for Improving Quality of Life by Leveraging Elements of Cognitive Stimulation Therapy

Dementia is one the leading causes of death globally. Although currently no cure exists, there are multiple interventions aimed at improving the quality of life of people with dementia by leveraging elements of cognitive stimulation therapy. This work is the first of a several-year research agenda that investigates the feasibility and effectiveness of embodied voice assistants to deliver such interventions. We describe the development of the GRACE prototype based on an open-source social robotics platform. We expand its functionality by adding two intervention components of cognitive stimulation therapy and making the robot more interactive by integrating a public large language model. We also conduct a first evaluation with 11 healthy participants who assess perceived technology characteristics including working alliance, an important relationship quality, which is robustly linked to treatment success. Results indicate that GRACE was perceived positively. We conclude this short paper with suggestions for improvement and outline future work.