IBM Cloud Services enhance automatic cognitive assessment via human-robot interaction

Thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence and social robotics, Hu-man-Robot Interaction (HRI) can be used as a non-invasive screening tool for the assessment of cognitive decline. In this scenario, the robot manages the assess-ment by providing the instructions to the patient, registering his/her answers and objectively calculating the final score. This service can help to save time and reach a wider population. From the technical point of view, a challenge is to achieve a highly reliable speech and visual recognition as required for a valid scor-ing of performance. In this article, we evaluate a system for cognitive assessment that makes use of the IBM AI Cloud services embodied in one of the most popular platforms for social robotics: the SoftBank Pepper. Results of a pilot study with 16 human par-ticipants shows that IBM Cloud services for speech and visual recognition can improve the system performance in comparison with standard interfaces. Im-portantly, the improvement allows achieving a significant correlation with one of the most used paper-and-pencil tests and, therefore, the study demonstrates the validity of the robotic approach for cognitive assessment