EACARE

The main goal of the multidisciplinary project EACare is to develop an embodied agent - a robot head with communicative skills - capable of interacting with especially elderly people at a clinic or in their home, analyzing their mental and psychological status via powerful audiovisual sensing and assessing their mental abilities to identify subjects in high risk or possibly at the first stages of cognitive decline, with a special focus on Alzheimer's disease. The interaction is performed according to the procedures developed for memory evaluation sessions, the key part of the diagnostic process for detecting cognitive decline. This new diagnostic system will be one of the means by which medical doctors evaluate people for cognitive decline, in parallel to the existing methods such as memory evaluation sessions with a (human) clinician, MRI scans, blood tests, etc. Different parts of the framework can also be used for other purposes, such as to develop tools for dementia preventive..