Florence Project: Make my day go better

The Florence project designs communication technology to assist people living with dementia.

The technology provides:

• Banks of meaningful personal knowledge;
• Metrics to detect communication difficulty;
• And prompts to support life tasks.

We co-design with people who live with or support those living with dementia.

Our team includes computer science, interaction design, speech pathology, psychology, cognitive science and occupational therapy.

Project Florence is a community-based project lead by the UQ node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for The Dynamics of Language.

Want to know more?

Check out the following video: Florence Project: Make my day go better

Want to get involved?

Are you living with dementia? Are you caring for someone with dementia?

Visit the Florence Community page for opportunities to get involved in the study and project updates. 

Florence in the news

• Developing transport technology with people living with dementia
• Building dementia tech together

Presentations
 

Key publications

D. Angus, Y. Yu, P. Vrbik, A. Back, and J. Wiles, “PauseCode: Computational Conversation Timing Analysis,” in Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Multimodal Analyses Enabling Artificial Agents in Human-Machine Interaction, New York, NY, USA, Oct. 2018, pp. 43–47, doi: 10.1145/3279972.3279975. Read Abstract 

C. Atay, E. R. Conway, D. Angus, J. Wiles, R. Baker, and H. J. Chenery, “An Automated Approach to Examining Conversational Dynamics between People with Dementia and Their Carers,” PLOS ONE, vol. 10, no. 12, p. e0144327, Dec. 2015, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0144327. Read Full Article 

C. Atay (née Knuepffer) et al., Using Discursis for the computer-­assisted analysis of conceptual recurrence in conversations in Parkinson’s disease. 2015. View PDF 

A. D. Back, D. Angus, and J. Wiles, “Determining the Number of Samples Required to Estimate Entropy in Natural Sequences,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 65, no. 7, pp. 4345–4352, Jul. 2019, doi: 10.1109/TIT.2019.2898412. Read Abstract 

A. D. Back, D. Angus, and J. Wiles, “Transitive Entropy—A Rank Ordered Approach for Natural Sequences,” IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 312–321, Feb. 2020, doi: 10.1109/JSTSP.2019.2939998. Read Abstract 

A. D. Back, D. Angus, and J. Wiles, “Fast Entropy Estimation for Natural Sequences,” arXiv:1805.06630 [physics], May 2018, Accessed: Feb. 19, 2021. [Online]. Available: Read Full Article 

H. J. Chenery, C. Atay, A. Campbell, E. Conway, D. Angus, and J. Wiles, “Using Technology to Enhance Communication Between People with Dementia and their Carers,” Alzheimer’s & Dementia, vol. 12, no. 7S_Part_5, pp. P279–P280, 2016, doi: Read Full Article 

J. Liddle et al., “‘Building the Threads of Connection that We Already Have’: The Nature of Connections via Technology for Older People,” Clinical Gerontologist, vol. 0, no. 0, pp. 1–12, Dec. 2020, doi: 10.1080/07317115.2020.1852638. Read Abstract 

R. A. Sluis et al., “An Automated Approach to Examining Pausing in the Speech of People With Dementia,” American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease & Other Dementiasr, vol. 35, p. 1533317520939773, 2020, doi: 10.1177/1533317520939773. Read Full Article 

B.-M. Whelan et al., “Toward the Development of SMART Communication Technology: Automating the Analysis of Communicative Trouble and Repair in Dementia,” Innovation in Aging, vol. 2, no. igy034, Sep. 2018, doi: 10.1093/geroni/igy034. Read Full Article