Clustering home activity distributions for automatic detection of mild cognitive impairment in older adults

Abstract

The public health implications of growing numbers of older adults at risk for dementia places pressure on identifying dementia at its earliest stages so as to develop proactive management plans. The prodromal dementia phase commonly identified as mild cognitive impairment is an important target for this early detection of impending dementia amenable to treatment. In this paper, we propose a method for home-based automatic detection of mild cognitive impairment in older adults through continuous monitoring via unobtrusive sensing technologies. Our method is composed of two main stages: a training stage and a test stage. For training, room activity distributions are estimated for each subject using a time frame of ω weeks, and then affinity propagation is employed to cluster the activity distributions and to extract exemplars to represent the different emerging clusters. For testing, room activity distributions belonging to a test subject with unknown cognitive status are compared to the extracted exemplars and get assigned the labels of the exemplars that result in the smallest normalized Kullbak–Leibler divergence. The labels of the activity distributions are then used to determine the cognitive status of the test subject. Using the sensor and clinical data pertaining to 85 homes with single occupants, we were able to automatically detect mild cognitive impairment in older adults with an F0.5 score of 0.856. Also, we were able to detect the non-amnestic sub-type of mild cognitive impairment in older adults with an F0.5 score of 0.958.