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© 2024. This work is licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Background:The rise in life expectancy is associated with an increase in long-term and gradual cognitive decline. Treatment effectiveness is enhanced at the early stage of the disease. Therefore, there is a need to find low-cost and ecological solutions for mass screening of community-dwelling older adults.

Objective:This work aims to exploit automatic analysis of free speech to identify signs of cognitive function decline.

Methods:A sample of 266 participants older than 65 years were recruited in Italy and Spain and were divided into 3 groups according to their Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE) scores. People were asked to tell a story and describe a picture, and voice recordings were used to extract high-level features on different time scales automatically. Based on these features, machine learning algorithms were trained to solve binary and multiclass classification problems by using both mono- and cross-lingual approaches. The algorithms were enriched using Shapley Additive Explanations for model explainability.

Results:In the Italian data set, healthy participants (MMSE score≥27) were automatically discriminated from participants with mildly impaired cognitive function (20≤MMSE score≤26) and from those with moderate to severe impairment of cognitive function (11≤MMSE score≤19) with accuracy of 80% and 86%, respectively. Slightly lower performance was achieved in the Spanish and multilanguage data sets.

Conclusions:This work proposes a transparent and unobtrusive assessment method, which might be included in a mobile app for large-scale monitoring of cognitive functionality in older adults. Voice is confirmed to be an important biomarker of cognitive decline due to its noninvasive and easily accessible nature.

Details

Title
Automatic Spontaneous Speech Analysis for the Detection of Cognitive Functional Decline in Older Adults: Multilanguage Cross-Sectional Study
Author
Ambrosini, Emilia  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Giangregorio, Chiara  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Lomurno, Eugenio  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Moccia, Sara  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Milis, Marios  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Loizou, Christos  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Azzolino, Domenico  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Cesari, Matteo  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Manuel Cid Gala  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Carmen Galán de Isla  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Gomez-Raja, Jonathan  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Borghese, Nunzio Alberto  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Matteucci, Matteo  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Ferrante, Simona  VIAFID ORCID Logo 
First page
e50537
Section
Frailty Detection, Assessment and Prediction
Publication year
2024
Publication date
2024
Publisher
JMIR Publications
e-ISSN
25617605
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
3053985529
Copyright
© 2024. This work is licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.