Affectively Aligned Cognitive Assistance Using Bayesian Affect Control Theory

This paper describes a novel emotionally intelligent cognitive assistant to engage and help older adults with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) to complete activities of daily living (ADL) more independently. Our new system combines two research streams. First, the development of cognitive assistants with artificially intelligent controllers using partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Second, a model of the dynamics of emotion and identity called Affect Control Theory that arises from the sociological literature on culturally shared sentiments. We present background material on both of these research streams, and then demonstrate a prototype assistive technology that combines the two. We discuss the affective reasoning, the probabilistic and decision-theoretic reasoning, the computer-vision based activity monitoring, the embodied prompting, and we show results in proof-of-concept tests.