Detection of Early Cognitive Loss from Medication Adherence Behavior

There is evidence that loss of memory contributes to poor medication adherence in the elderly [1,2]. We previously investigated this contribution in a group of independently-living seniors [3]. Here we describe the application of statistical pattern recognition techniques to medication adherence data, and demonstrate that patterns of adherence can reliably detect mild cognitive loss. We apply neural network classifiers to the task of discriminating between healthy individuals and those with early cognitive loss on the basis of medication adherence behavior. The results establish that data from relatively unobtrusive behavior monitoring can provide reliable inference for individuals.