The eDEM-Connect chatbot is a domain-adapted AI assistant developed to support dementia-care communication and caregiver decision-making. It is based on a fine-tuned TinyLlama-1.1B language model, trained with LoRA on 1,393 dementia-care examples from the Informal Dementia Forum Corpus (IDFC). The corpus contains 775 pairs of informal conversational questions and answers collected from an online dementia forum, where users share their experiences of caring for people with dementia (PwD) and seek advice from others.

After fine-tuning, the model was converted into GGUF format to enable efficient local deployment. As a result, the chatbot can be used locally and without internet access, supporting data privacy. The chatbot is designed to provide accessible responses on dementia care, agitation-related situations, caregiver support, and non-pharmacological intervention strategies. The eDEM-Connect chatbot was evaluated using a set of 35 question–answer pairs, comprising approximately 1,500 sentences, sampled from the dementia caregiver forum. For each question, responses were generated by the eDEM-Connect chatbot using Anthropic’s prompting strategy. These generated responses were then compared with real user responses from the dementia forum corpus.

Publication:

1. S. Suravee, M.R. Ghods, K. Yordanova (2026). Loc-DemCare: Supporting Informal Dementia Caregivers with a Local, Intelligent Chatbot. International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), work in progress session. Pisa, Italy (accepted).