IBM Research plans to create a reliable method for the early diagnosis of dementia using smartphones



    Unfortunately, a disease such as dementia (dementia) cannot be cured. Nevertheless, early diagnosis and appropriate care can significantly improve the quality of life of both the patient and his relatives. Since 2012, specialists at IBM Research have been developing methods for determining the likelihood of a person getting such a disease, as well as early diagnosis of dementia.

    Nowadays, as a reliable tool for research and diagnostics, you can use a mobile device - a tablet or smartphone. And scientists from IBM now work precisely with such devices as part of the DemCare project. The head of the project is Aaron Sutt.

    “With age, any person loses some of their cognitive abilities, but in the case of dementia, this process is too fast, and we would like to diagnose the disease at the earliest stages,” says Sutt.

    Dementia is not uncommon, and the number of cases is gradually increasing. By 2050, doctors expect an increase in the number of patients with this diagnosis three times. Therefore, the definition of dementia in the early stages is simply necessary. At the same time, sending every elderly person over 60 to a doctor or tomography is not very practical.

    The main question is how to carry out the diagnostic procedure quickly and without problems. Since by the time the family can persuade a person to go to the hospital, dementia may already be progressing.

    What to do?


    The IBM Research team is developing an application that runs on any smartphone or tablet. This application asks a number of questions, showing pictures, plus records a person’s voice. In addition, the application asks the person to repeat what he just heard, or count something, describe the picture, name all the animals that the person remembers for half a minute. There are other tasks.
    While the questions look random, they form a single whole, it is a system of neurophysiological tests that normally require half an hour of work of a qualified doctor with a patient. The technique developed by IBM reduces the time required for the diagnostic procedure to 5 minutes, plus the entire process is automated.

    All records and other information are transferred to IBM Watson, a system that runs a specific algorithm for the loaded data. The algorithm is based on information collected from thousands of medical histories, audio recordings, tests of people with dementia. The information used by Watson is divided into three groups. The first refers to older people who complain of poor memory but do not suffer from dementia or other similar illnesses. The second group is people with dementia in the very early stages. And the third group is people with severe dementia at the initial stage of the disease (Alzheimer's disease in the early stages is also taken into account).

    How it works?


    IBM Watson does not evaluate the recordings themselves, but the tonality of the voice on the audio, pauses between words, stutters, and speech duration. In this case, doctors usually evaluate precisely the content of the patient’s speech, and not the tonality or other parameters that may not be visible to the observer, but for the computer there are already obvious signs of the disease. The accuracy of the algorithm is now 85%.

    Naturally, IBM Watson cannot make a diagnosis, but as an auxiliary tool for doctors, the application and service are very effective. Now developers are trying to determine the optimal feedback - the amount of data that the application gives about the disease (or its absence). If the information provided by the service is not too detailed, the patient is recommended to go to the doctor for a more detailed examination.

    The technology is undergoing clinical trials so far only in Europe, but soon the testing phase in the USA will begin. Nevertheless, according to the developers, the technology is still far from entering the market.

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