Let me tell you a joke.
Why do you go to bed every night?
Because the bed wouldn't come to you.
Ha ha! That's a good one, Pepper, I like
that.
So people are living longer now a days.
And as they are living longer,
we are realizing that a lot of these people are affected with dementia.
And the growth in people with dementia
is exponential all across the world.
What we would like to do is help with care provision.
And we would like to use technology in that.
[My name is Pepper.]
What are you driven to do?
[I am driven to help dementia patients.]
Who do you work with?
[I work with Arshia Khan and her students at the University of Minnesota Duluth.]
[We have a great team.]
[I love working with Arshia and her students]
[and I look forward to helping a dementia patient. ]
[I have sensors that can track and recognize objects and speech.]
People who have dementia need a lot of care, 24/7 care.
And it's impossible with human beings to be
present with somebody who has dementia 24/7.
So what we would like to do is use robots
in providing care.
So we are not going to replace care providers,
but we would like to augment care by helping out with robotics.
When somebody is recently diagnosed with dementia,
which is the MCI stage, mild cognitive impairment.
We would send that person home with Pepper.
And Pepper would follow them, live with them,
and at that stage their daily living activities are still in tact.
So they know what they usually do.
They may get up in the morning, take a
shower, go for a run, come back and have some breakfast,
read the news and go to work.
So Pepper will follow them and learn their 
daily living activities.
And as they progress in dementia and they start to forget their daily living activities,
They might forget to take a shower or they may forget to have breakfast.
Pepper will remind them and help assist in those daily living activities.
So for instance, if the person made an omelette for breakfast every morning,
and forgets how to make the omelette,
Pepper would offer the recipe.
If the person forgot to for a run,
Pepper might say, hey you know you haven't done your exercise for today,
would you like to do it now?
Do you want me to remind you how to do your exercise?
So to help maintain their quality of living
and delay them getting into assisted living care.
Face recognition could have Pepper recognize a couple of people,
which at some point the user, which is our dementia patient,
might not be able to recognize.
We can also avoid social isolation of the patient
by having Pepper have some sort of conversation with them.
Obviously with the current world being what it is,
you kind of become aware that there's a lot of bad ways to use technology.
So it's nice to actually be working on something that's using technology for good
and that can help people.
So I guess, to sum it up, it's very rewarding to work on a project like this.
As an engineer I think in terms of,
you know, well how can I make this application work?
It's more than that.
We are working with human beings and we have to understand there's ethics related there.
So we have an ethicist who works with us as well.
She looks like an alien. She's really cute.
So obviously when you join a program you're not really
sure what's going to be next after you're
done graduating.
But my experience over time, 
with the research over here,
it really encouraged me to continue 
with the research track.
I'm driven to help assist people with dementia.
And use technology in helping them at least maintain their quality of life,
if not improve their quality of life.
