Looking at Your Photo, What Comes to Mind? Personalized Memory Internalization for Dementia Reminiscence

Abstract

We present PhoMi, an interactive recall assistant that supports dementia reminiscence by engaging users with personal photographs captured via a live camera interface. Given a photograph, PhoMi delivers spoken questions and receives spoken responses, creating an accessible reminiscence setting with reduced reliance of human therapists. Over repeated sessions, user responses are incorporated into lightweight adapters of a vision–language model, enabling progressively personalized question generation without reprocessing prior interaction logs. PhoMi serves as a prototype toward scalable, lifelong AI companions for dementia reminiscence.