Automated speech-based screening for alzheimer's disease in a care service scenario

This paper describes a benchmark study for a lightweight and low-cost dementia screening tool. The tool is easy to administer, requires no additional experimentation material, and automatically evaluates and indicates potential subjects with dementia. The protocol foresees that subjects answer four distinct tasks, three of which are ordinary questions and one is a counting prompt. In our care use case, older people are assessed remotely via the tool, potentially even via telephone or within a daily care service routine. The assessment results are subsequently sent to professionals who initiate further steps. A machine learning classifier was trained on the French Dem@Care corpus. Solely utilizing vocal features, the classifier reaches 89% accuracy. Implications for the use case and further steps are discussed.