Ethically Collecting Conversations With People that have Cognitive Impairments

This is a streamlined abridgement of my paper with Pierre Albert, published at LREC's Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies 2020. If you use any of this guide in your research, please do cite our paper titled "Ethically Collecting Multi-Modal Spontaneous Conversations with People that have Cognitive Impairments": Getting ethical approval to collect a crucial corpus took me over a year to complete. This was relatively fresh ground to tread, but I hope other researchers want to work on the accessibility of voice assistants for people with all varieties of cognitive impairments. This practical guide aims to help future researchers, like me, collect these valuable datasets quickly without compromising any ethical considerations or data security. Over a year ago now, I decided that I wanted to work to make voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, etc…) more accessible for people with dementia. To begin this project, I (with two of my supervisors) first detailed some of the critical challenges that need to be tackled if we are to make progress towards this goal.