Data Collection from Persons with Mild Forms of Cognitive Impairment and Healthy Controls - Infrastructure for Classification and Prediction of Dementia

Cognitive and mental deterioration, such as difficulties with memory and language, are some of the typical phenotypes for most neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's disease and other dementia forms. This paper describes the first phases of a project that aims at collecting various types of cognitive data, acquired from human subjects in order to study relationships among linguistic and extra-linguistic observations. The project’s aim is to identify, extract, process, correlate, evaluate, and disseminate various linguistic phenotypes and measurements and thus contribute with complementary knowledge in early diagnosis, monitor progression, or predict individuals at risk. In the near future, automatic analysis of these data will be used to extract various types of features for training, testing and evaluating automatic classifiers that could be used to differentiate individuals with mild symptoms of cognitive impairment from healthy, age-matched controls and identify possible indicators for the early detection of mild forms of cognitive impairment. Features will be extracted from audio recordings (speech signal), the transcription of the audio signals (text) and the raw eye-tracking data.