Automated Functional and Behavioral Health Assessment of Older Adults with Dementia

Dementia is a clinical syndrome of cognitive deficits that involves both memory and functional impairments. While disruptions in cognition is a striking feature of dementia, it is also closely coupled with changes in functional and behavioral health of older adults. In this paper, we investigate the challenges of improving the automatic assessment of dementia, by better exploiting the emerging physiological sensors in conjunction with ambient sensors in a real field environment with IRB approval. We hypothesize that the cognitive health of older individuals can be estimated by tracking their daily activities and mental arousal states. We employ signal processing on wearable sensor data streams (e.g., Electrodermal Activity (EDA), Photoplethysmogram (PPG), accelerometer (ACC)) and machine learning algorithms to assess cognitive impairments and its correlation with functional health decline. To validate our approach, we quantify the score of machine learning, survey and observation based Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) and signal processing based mental arousal state, respectively for functional and behavioral health measures among 17 older adults living in a continuing care retirement community in Baltimore. We compare clinically observed scores with technology guided automated scores using both machine learning and statistical techniques.