The title of the project that has obtained the help of the Dávalos-Fletcher Foundation in the area of Experimental Sciences, Nature and the Environment is “Artificial Intelligence and conversational assistants in evaluating the quality of life of older people from Castellón and its application to the alarm situation caused by COVID-19 ».
The objective of the project is to develop a conversational assistant capable of having a conversation with older people in order to obtain information on various aspects related to their quality of life.
Conversational assistants represent an alternative in the current methodology for the evaluation of psychological constructs, they allow reaching a greater number of people, as well as obtaining a greater frequency in their responses, allowing follow-up over time, in addition to offering a greater privacy when answering the questionnaires, since the presence of a person who collects the answers is not necessary.
In this project, the assistant will evaluate different psychological and health aspects through a conversation, through the use of widely used and validated questionnaires in the field of Psychology. These questionnaires or scales are the UCLA for the evaluation of loneliness, the Lubben Social Network Scale-6 (LSNS-6) for the evaluation of social isolation, the WHO-5 scale for the evaluation of mental well-being and depression and anxiety assessment questionnaire Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7). In addition to asking the standard questions of each scale, the conversational assistant will be able to ask open-ended questions that allow obtaining qualitative information about what the elderly person considers relevant about their state of mental health at the time of the evaluation. This will allow knowing, in real time when compared with the current methodology, the parameters related to the quality of life and mental health of older people, allowing health professionals to intervene in cases where these parameters reach unwanted levels of loneliness, anxiety or prolonged depression , or great social isolation, and obtain rapid feedback on the results of the interventions carried out to reduce the feeling of loneliness, anxiety or depression and to improve the quality of life and mental well-being of the elderly.
For all this, it is of great importance for the project to have the participation of the citizens of Castellón de La Plana.
