Duplication Analysis of Conversation and Its Application to Cognitive Training of Older Adults in Care Facilities

Group conversation plays a main role in human social network, which is an interaction of people with surrounding environment and other people. Some research work have been shown that person who has more social activities, will have less cognitive function impairments. This paper describes duplication analysis of conversation used for a measure of conversation interactivity among older adults in two care facilities. Among speech speed, number of utterances, overlap and other conversation characteristics, we focus on duplication of words used during conversation because it reflects listening comprehension and memory function of each participant. The purpose of this study is to investigate the activities for prevention of dementia by cognitive training through interactive conversation, which will be evaluated quantitatively and given effectively to each older adult. Coimagination Method for the prevention of dementia and declining cognitive via conversation is used in this experiment. We analyzed the conversations in Coimagination Method with a measure to reveal interactivity of conversation via Set-theoretical Measure of Interaction and its duplication analysis. Variation of conversation characteristics on each participant are found by the number of words used and state probabilities. Experimental results show that conversation interactivity measured by duplication of words was correlated with cognitive function.