“AI Therapist for Daily Functioning Assessment and Intervention using Smart Home Devices” received Best Demo Runner-up Award at ACM SenSys 2022

We demoed our work “AI Therapist for Daily Functioning Assessment and Intervention using Smart Home Devices” at ACM SenSys 2022 and received the Best Demo Runner-Up Award.

In this demonstration, in collaboration with licensed therapists, we introduce an AI therapist that takes advantage of the smart-home environment to screen day-to-day functioning and infer mental wellness of an occupant. Our system can assess a user’s daily functioning and mental wellness based on a combination of direct conversation with users and information obtained from smart home devices using psychological rubrics. We demonstrate that our system can converse with a user in a natural way (through a smartphone or smart speaker) and analyze a user’s response semantically and sentimentally. In addition, we show that our system can provide preliminary interventions to help improve the user’s wellness. In particular, when abnormal behavior is detected during the conversation or by smart home devices, the system provides psychotherapeutic consolations during the conversation and will check on the occupant’s condition by actuating a home robot.

Jingping Nie, Stephen Xia, Minghui Zhao, and Xinghua Sun demoed the conversational screening and psychotherapeutic intervention capabilities of our AI therapist using Amazon Echo and Smartphone; illustrated how the smart home devices can be used for day-to-day functioning screening; and showed how a home robot could be used to interact with the user and provide interventions when necessary. We would like to thank our primary licensed therapist, Vera (Hanya) Shao, for the help.