A virtual companion for older adults using the Rasa Conversational AI framework

With life expectancy growing rapidly over the past century, there is a need to find new ways to support active and healthy ageing and address those factors that can affect the well-being and emotional state of older adults. Various digital solutions have been proposed, including the use of a virtual coach (or chatbot) that can use technologies from Conversational AI to provide companionship and support where tradi- tional resources have become scare and costly. This paper describes how some use cases that were identified in a large, ongoing joint European and Japanese research and development project can be implemented us- ing the Rasa Conversational AI framework. The focus of the paper is mainly on the development process showing how Rasa can be used ef- fectively to provide conversational support across a number of relevant use cases and how to test and validate the implementations. The paper concludes with a brief usability study and suggestions for future work.