Detecting Wandering Behavior of People with Dementia

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time GPS-based method for detecting wandering in dementia patients by identifying anomalous movement patterns, aiming to prevent dangerous situations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that transforms GPS data into geohash sequences to detect abnormal wandering behavior more accurately than existing methods.

Findings

Achieved up to 0.99 AUC in experiments

Outperformed state-of-the-art approaches

Effectively identified frequent locations

Abstract

Wandering is a problematic behavior in people with dementia that can lead to dangerous situations. To alleviate this problem we design an approach for the real-time automatic detection of wandering leading to getting lost. The approach relies on GPS data to determine frequent locations between which movement occurs and a step that transforms GPS data into geohash sequences. Those can be used to find frequent and normal movement patterns in historical data to then be able to determine whether a new on-going sequence is anomalous. We conduct experiments on synthetic data to test the ability of the approach to find frequent locations and to compare it against an alternative, state-of-the-art approach. Our approach is able to identify frequent locations and to obtain good performance (up to AUC = 0.99 for certain parameter settings) outperforming the state-of-the-art approach.