via AI.Nony.Mous
Researchers from the University of Tsukuba and IBM Research have developed a self-administered mobile application that analyzes speech data as an automatic screening tool for the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease. Using automatic speech recognition, the proposed mobile application reliably estimates the degree of language impairments and detects Alzheimer’s disease in its prodromal stage.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia. It is important to start intervention from an early stage, e.g., the mild cognitive impairment (MCI) stage, to prevent or delay the progression of AD. For the early detection of AD and MCI, there is a growing need to develop user-friendly, self-administered screening tools for use in everyday life. Speech is a promising data source that can be used for developing such screening tools. Language impairments have been observed in the early stages of AD, and linguistic features characterizing these impairments have been used for the automatic detection of AD. However, the accuracy of automatic speech recognition used for converting human voice to text is generally of poorer quality in the case of elderly people than for people from other age groups, posing a challenge for developing an automatic tool.
Herein, researchers developed a prototype of a self-administered mobile application to help in the early detection of AD and MCI. Using this application, researchers collected and analyzed speech data of five cognitive tasks from 114 participants, including AD patients, MCI patients, and cognitively normal participants. The tasks were based on neuropsychological assessments used for dementia screening and included picture description and verbal fluency tasks. The results demonstrate that the degree of language impairments assessed by linguistic features, particularly those related to the semantic aspects (e.g., informativeness and vocabulary richness), could be reliably estimated at poor speech recognition accuracy. Moreover, by combining these linguistic features with acoustic and prosodic features of the participant’s voice, machine learning models could reliably detect MCI and AD, showing 88% and 91% accuracy, respectively.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show the feasibility of an automatic, self-administered screening tool for detecting AD and MCI by reliably capturing language impairments even from the speech data obtained under poor automatic speech recognition accuracy conditions. The proposed tool may help increase the access to screening tools for the early detection of AD.
Original Article: Self-Administered Mobile Application to Detect Alzheimer’s Disease Using Speech Data
More from: University of Tsukuba | IBM Research
The Latest Updates from Bing News
Go deeper with Bing News on:
Alzheimer’s disease detection
- Neola woman's fight against Alzheimer's earns statewide recognition
A Neola woman, JoDee Junkman, has received a statewide award for her work in fighting against Alzheimer's disease.
- Alzheimer’s Association Announces 2024 Northwest Ohio Walk to End Alzheimer’s Dates
May 8, 2024—The Alzheimer’s Association Northwest Ohio Chapter has announced the dates and locations for eight local 2024 Walk to ...
- Alzheimer's Disease: Expert Explains 7 Stages Of This Condition
Alzheimers disease is a progressive brain disease that affects memory and thinking Read on to learn the seven stages of this condition ...
- How people manage money may help detect dementia four years earlier – study
How people manage their money may be able to detect Alzheimer’s disease or related dementias up to four years earlier, new research has found. The Irish study found that 71 per cent of people ...
- Scientists lay the case for a genetic cause for Alzheimer's
Experts say that if accepted as a genetic form of Alzheimer’s, this new disease classification would broaden the ... released a blood test targeted at people 50 and older called AD-Detect that ...
Go deeper with Bing News on:
Alzheimer’s
- Former FOX31 anchor raising awareness after Alzheimer’s claims her mother’s life
She spent more than a decade at the FOX31 anchor desk, sharing the stories of Coloradans often struggling through difficult times. But Libby Weaver never expected the struggles her own family would face.
- Five ways to celebrate Mother’s Day with someone who has Alzheimer’s
According to the National Institutes of Health, women account for two-thirds of of all Americans living with Alzheimer’s disease. Because of how many women are touched by this disease, the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America (AFA) has come up with some special ways to spend Mother’s Day with the women you love.