Study of Community Event Introduction Service for Promoting In-Home Elderly Social Participation

Currently, the proportion of elderly population to the total population in Japan is the highest in the world, and the proportion of elderly population is expected to continue to rise in the future. Also, the proportion of elderly people living alone is increasing year by year, and the proportion of lonely and isolated elderly people is increasing. In such a situation, our research group is developing a virtual agent (VA) listening service to listen to the daily lives of elderly people at home. However, this service lacked functionality to engage users in social activities, so there was a challenge in promoting user social participation. Hence, in this study, we proposed and implemented a "Community Event Introduction Service" to promote social participation of elderly people at home by allowing them to learn about community events while interacting with virtual agent. As a result, we were able to implement a service to propose and remind community events through the Virtual Agent Listening Service, promoting social participation of elderly people at home. In the future, we plan to evaluate the Community Event Introduction Service based on the results of long-term evaluation experiments and implement a function to estimate preferences from the dialogue content of the elderly.