An Automatic System for Dementia Detection using Acoustic and Linguistic Features

Abstract

Early diagnosis of dementia is crucial for mitigating the consequences of this disease in patients. Previous studies have demonstrated that it is possible to detect the symptoms of dementia, in some cases even years before the onset of the disease, by detecting neurodegeneration-associated characteristics in a person’s speech. This paper presents an automatic method for detecting dementia caused by Alzheimer’s disease (AD) through a wide range of acoustic and linguistic features extracted from the person’s speech. Two well-known databases containing speech for patients with AD and healthy controls are used to this end: DementiaBank and ADReSS. The experimental results show that our system is able to achieve state-of-theart performance on both databases. Furthermore, our results also show that the linguistic features extracted from the speech transcription are significantly better for detecting dementia.