Speech Reveals Future Risk of Developing Dementia: Predictive Dementia Screening from Biographic Interviews

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive incurable condition for which the success of any symptomatic therapy depends crucially on the starting time. Ideally it starts before the disease has caused any cognitive impairments. Our work aims at developing speech-based dementia screening methods that detect dementia as early as possible. Here, we aim to predict the outbreak even before clinical screening tests can diagnose the disease. Using the longitudinal ILSE study, we automatically extract features from biographic interviews and predict the development of dementia 5 and 12 years into the future. Our prediction system achieves results of 73.3% and 75.7% unweighted average recall (UAR), respectively, which clearly outperform a prediction based on prior diagnoses or disease prevalence. Thus, the automated analysis of spoken interviews offers a highly effective prediction procedure that allows for easy-to-use, cost-effective casual testing.