Dementia Prediction in Older People through Topic-cued Spontaneous Conversation

Rutkowski, T. M.; Abe, M. S.; Tokunaga, S.; Otake-Matsuura, M.

An increase in dementia cases is producing significant medical and economic pressure in many communities. This growing problem calls for the application of AI-based technologies to support early diagnostics, and for subsequent non-pharmacological cognitive interventions and mental well-being monitoring. We present a practical application of a machine learning (ML) model in the domain known as 'AI for social good'. In particular, we focus on early dementia onset prediction from speech patterns in natural conversation situations. This paper explains our model and study results of conversational speech pattern-based prognostication of mild dementia onset indicated by predictive Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE) scores. Experiments with elderly subjects are conducted in natural conversation situations, with four members in each study group. We analyze the resulting four-party conversation speech transcripts within a natural language processing (NLP) deep learning framework to obtain conversation embedding. With a fully connected deep learning model, we use the conversation topic changing distances for subsequent MMSE score prediction. This pilot study is conducted with Japanese elderly subjects within a healthy group. The best median MMSE prediction errors are at the level of 0.167, with a median coefficient of determination equal to 0.330 and a mean absolute error of 0.909. The results presented are easily reproducible for other languages by swapping the language model in the proposed deep-learning conversation embedding approach.