Voice assistant systems such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home may soon be able to identify signs of cognitive impairment.
Researchers from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and the University of Massachusetts Boston were awarded a four-year grant worth nearly $1.2 million to develop a system for detecting signs of cognitive decline using voice assistant technology. The grant came from the National Institute of Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, and covers an 18-month laboratory evaluation followed by a 28-month home evaluation.
“Alzheimer's disease and related dementias are a major public health concern that lead to high health costs, risk of nursing home placement, and place an inordinate burden on the whole family,” John A. Batsis, MD, an associate professor at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, said in a prepared statement. “The ability to plan in the early stages of the disease is essential for initiating interventions and providing support systems to improve patients' everyday function and quality of life.”
“We are tackling a significant and complicated data-science question: whether the collection of long-term speech patterns of individuals at home will enable us to develop new speech-analysis methods for early detection of this challenging disease,” Xiaohui Liang, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said in the same statement. “Our team envisions that the changes in the speech patterns of individuals using the voice assistant systems may be sensitive to their decline in memory and function over time.”
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, are also participating in this study.
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