Alzheimer’s
disease affects millions of persons every year. Negative emotions such as
stress and frustration have a negative impact on memory function and
Alzheimer's patients experience more negative emotions than healthy adults.
Non-pharmacological treatment such as immersion in virtual environments could
help Alzheimer patients by reducing their negative emotions, but it has
restrictions and requirements. In this work, we present three virtual reality
relaxing systems in which the patients are immersed in relaxing environments.
We propose to use intelligent agents in order to adapt the relaxing environment
to each participant and optimize its relaxation effect. The intelligent agents
track the emotions of patients using electroencephalography as input in order
to adaptthe environments. We designed each system with different levels of
intelligence in order to analyze the impact of the adaptation on the patients.
Experiments were performed for each system on participants with subjective
cognitive decline. Results show that these relaxing systems can reduce negative
emotions and improve participants’ memory performance. The positive effects on
affective state and memory persisted for a longer period of time and were
generally more effective for the systems with more intelligence. We believe
that the combination of a relaxing environment, virtual reality, intelligent agents for adaptingthe
environment, and brain assessment is a promising method for helping Alzheimer’s
patients.
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