Abstract

In Japan, “Sleep Debt” and “Sleep Deprivation,” especially in Japanese children and women and in Home Nursing Care (HNC), are being social problems. Even though we do not always live alone and our sleep sometimes affects each other between multiple persons, e.g., a pair of a child and her/his parent, a couple, and a group of family members with/out pet animal(s), by sharing our living space and a sleeping room, there exists no study on support systems for better sleep adapted to not a single but paired users other than the authors’ studies. Therefore, this paper more deeply conducts a generalized study on their adaptation to relationships and interactions not only between a single user and a system with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) but also between paired users (and a system). In addition, this paper reports a specialized user study in home nursing care, on effects of a support system not only on each single user’s Quality of Sleep (QoS) but also on paired users’ Quality of Paired Sleeping (QoPS). The proposed system offers a daughter AI’s speaking to a pair of her father (who is a husband and a care receiver) and her mother (who is his wife and his care giver) as a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) before/after their sleeping. The AI speaker has the synthesized voice by Google Home, real voice of a close member, e.g., a daughter, or a stranger of the paired subjects’ family, as control variables.

Keywords:Sleep informatics; Sleep education engineering; Quality of Paired Sleeping (QoPS); Multiparty dialogue; Boundary and relationality perspective systemics