CARE-RATE: Cognitive computing to connect family caregivers with resources to support people living with dementia

CARE-RATE is an online resource (product) to support family caregivers of individuals with dementia. CARE-RATE leverages natural language processing and artificial intelligence to power a dialogue-based interface that enables caregivers to describe the problem they are having to CARE-RATE, which returns tailored information about assistive technology, local, regional, and global resources, online forums, and strategies that suit their specific needs. In other words, caregivers will describe the problem they are facing and, in a similar manner as they would to a health care service provider (either verbally or using a keyboard), CARE-RATE will guide them through a series of questions to clarify the caregiver/care recipient’s context and care concerns.

This is a different approach from search engines (such as Google) that require you to know what you are looking for before you search it; with CARE-RATE you describe the situation you are facing rather than a solution. Caregivers can rate the usefulness of the information provided to them by CARE-RATE, which will leverage machine learning to make better recommendations over time.

CARE-RATE is Work Package (WP) 2.3 of the AGE-WELL NCE and is being completed with in-kind support from the Alzheimer Society.

Keywords: Caregivers, search engine, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, dementia, web application, iterative search, search result refinement, document filtering.