CognoSpeak: an automatic, remote assessment of early cognitive decline in real-world conversational speech

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Pahar, Madhurananda, Tao, Fuxiang, Mirheidari, Bahman, Pevy, Nathan, Bright, Rebecca, Gadgil, Swapnil, Sproson, Lise, Braun, Dorota, Illingworth, Caitlin, Blackburn, Daniel, Christensen, Heidi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Pahar, Madhurananda
Tao, Fuxiang
Mirheidari, Bahman
Pevy, Nathan
Bright, Rebecca
Gadgil, Swapnil
Sproson, Lise
Braun, Dorota
Illingworth, Caitlin
Blackburn, Daniel
Christensen, Heidi
author_facet Pahar, Madhurananda
Tao, Fuxiang
Mirheidari, Bahman
Pevy, Nathan
Bright, Rebecca
Gadgil, Swapnil
Sproson, Lise
Braun, Dorota
Illingworth, Caitlin
Blackburn, Daniel
Christensen, Heidi
contents The early signs of cognitive decline are often noticeable in conversational speech, and identifying those signs is crucial in dealing with later and more serious stages of neurodegenerative diseases. Clinical detection is costly and time-consuming and although there has been recent progress in the automatic detection of speech-based cues, those systems are trained on relatively small databases, lacking detailed metadata and demographic information. This paper presents CognoSpeak and its associated data collection efforts. CognoSpeak asks memory-probing long and short-term questions and administers standard cognitive tasks such as verbal and semantic fluency and picture description using a virtual agent on a mobile or web platform. In addition, it collects multimodal data such as audio and video along with a rich set of metadata from primary and secondary care, memory clinics and remote settings like people's homes. Here, we present results from 126 subjects whose audio was manually transcribed. Several classic classifiers, as well as large language model-based classifiers, have been investigated and evaluated across the different types of prompts. We demonstrate a high level of performance; in particular, we achieved an F1-score of 0.873 using a DistilBERT model to discriminate people with cognitive impairment (dementia and people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI)) from healthy volunteers using the memory responses, fluency tasks and cookie theft picture description. CognoSpeak is an automatic, remote, low-cost, repeatable, non-invasive and less stressful alternative to existing clinical cognitive assessments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_05755
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CognoSpeak: an automatic, remote assessment of early cognitive decline in real-world conversational speech
Pahar, Madhurananda
Tao, Fuxiang
Mirheidari, Bahman
Pevy, Nathan
Bright, Rebecca
Gadgil, Swapnil
Sproson, Lise
Braun, Dorota
Illingworth, Caitlin
Blackburn, Daniel
Christensen, Heidi
Sound
Machine Learning
Audio and Speech Processing
The early signs of cognitive decline are often noticeable in conversational speech, and identifying those signs is crucial in dealing with later and more serious stages of neurodegenerative diseases. Clinical detection is costly and time-consuming and although there has been recent progress in the automatic detection of speech-based cues, those systems are trained on relatively small databases, lacking detailed metadata and demographic information. This paper presents CognoSpeak and its associated data collection efforts. CognoSpeak asks memory-probing long and short-term questions and administers standard cognitive tasks such as verbal and semantic fluency and picture description using a virtual agent on a mobile or web platform. In addition, it collects multimodal data such as audio and video along with a rich set of metadata from primary and secondary care, memory clinics and remote settings like people's homes. Here, we present results from 126 subjects whose audio was manually transcribed. Several classic classifiers, as well as large language model-based classifiers, have been investigated and evaluated across the different types of prompts. We demonstrate a high level of performance; in particular, we achieved an F1-score of 0.873 using a DistilBERT model to discriminate people with cognitive impairment (dementia and people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI)) from healthy volunteers using the memory responses, fluency tasks and cookie theft picture description. CognoSpeak is an automatic, remote, low-cost, repeatable, non-invasive and less stressful alternative to existing clinical cognitive assessments.
title CognoSpeak: an automatic, remote assessment of early cognitive decline in real-world conversational speech
topic Sound
Machine Learning
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05755