CALONIS : An artificial Companion for the care of cognitively impaired patients

The paper concerns a prototype MCA or Companion (called CALONIS, a Roman soldier’s servant) for a braindamaged Veteran with no long-term memory intended to provide engagement, diversion and assistance, but with some possibilities of therapy and aids in cognitive testing. Ethical issues arise from how a Companion presents itself in such a situation and how it should manage its relationship with the patient and his or her carer, in particular in regard to information passing between them. The project began with a Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) version of CALONIS and already at that stage interesting and potentially ethical issues arose in relation to the carer. We discuss the ethical issues in part by answers to fundamental criticisms of this strain of work raised by [1]. The full Companion prototype, beyond the WOZ, is based on a Senior Companion developed as part of a large-scale EU project, designed as a dialogue system to converse with an older person, eliciting knowledge from them about their past through the medium of photographs and so building a knowledge-base about the user’s life. CALONIS, however, is designed for a quite specific type of user: a patient with Traumatic Brain injury with impaired executive functioning, short-term and long term memory problems, and difficulty initiating and maintaining conversations and carrying out simple tasks. The purpose of CALONIS is to achieve some level of relationship with the patient, a “stickiness”, by any means and to use this so as to, for example, monitor the patient’s movements so that he can indicate where he is going when he leaves the building etc. Initial results show a much improved level of engagement on the patient’s part.