AI Digital Nurse Assistant (ADiNA)
Grace the Robot made news in October when she was deployed at the Résidence Pearl & Theo in Montreal as part of a study on loneliness. However, deploying such robots is an expensive proposition, not accessible to many facilities. Our research group at McGill University is working to expand on this approach, based on computer-generated avatars, intended for interaction with older clients in retirement homes, senior residences, or home care, to provide assistance to nurses and care staff, helping reduce workload by serving as a possible initial point of communication with clients, triaging communications during periods of overload, and serving as a potential social conversation partner.
The avatar we are building, ADiNA, is based heavily on large language models, speech recognition and synthesis. ADiNA presents different on-screen human appearances, as best-suited to the preferences of each client. ADiNA interacts through natural conversation with multilingual ability, collecting information potentially relevant to assessment of psychosocial state and general wellbeing, reminding clients of daily routine activities as relevant to their individual situation, e.g., meals, medication, hygiene, and physical activity, and passes along important information to care staff.
We are preparing to conduct a second-phase study with members of an older adult residence, in which care staff will first provide ADiNA with basic background about their clients who consent to participate in the study. Those participants will then interact with ADiNA for a few sessions, and ADiNA will prepare a short report on the interaction for the benefit of care staff. We will then carry out follow-up interviews with both the care staff and older adult clients to help us assess the prototype and determine priorities for improvements and additional features.
ADiNA’s development was funded intially by a Mitacs grant, and was an outgrowth of an earlier project, Mixed-Reality Platform for Simulation and Synthesis of Multi-Modal Hallucinations with Applications to Schizophrenia Treatment, funded by NSERC and MEDTEQ.