Generative AI and Metaverse: Companionship and Assisted Living for Elderly People

Abstract

An increasing trend in the number of elderly people across the globe demands more attention and support for several issues in their daily lives. With the advancement of age, there can be a cognitive decline, dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, hearing loss, impaired sight, cardiac and orthopedic problems. Moreover, restricted movements and lack of physical interactions with relatives, friends and others can create a feeling of isolation among them and may become prone to depression. Again, with the remarkable development of digital technologies and smartphones, various digital applications or Apps covering health, banking, shopping and social media have come up for carrying out daily activities from home through an online mode. However, quite a number of elderly people still feel uncomfortable with the new technologies and regular companionship and assistance are also required for these continuously evolving digital technological environments. Metaverse can be a good immersive and supportive application platform for the elderly people. Moreover, Generative AI is a new promising technology that has huge potential to empower metaverse. No research or publication is known to the author that has discussed in details the ways for aiding elderly people for the mentioned issues under a metaverse platform with the help of generative AI. The current paper has introduced the potential of Generative AI to empower Metaverse and has shown the support and assistantship that they can provide together to elderly people through a few use cases.

Note:
Funding Information: None.

Declaration of Interests: The author declares to have no conflict of interest.

Keywords: elderly people, generative ai, metaverse, multimodal, virtual reality