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

TL;DR

CognoSpeak is a remote, automated speech-based system that effectively detects early cognitive decline using multimodal data and advanced classifiers, offering a low-cost alternative to traditional clinical assessments.

Contribution

This paper introduces CognoSpeak, a novel system that collects multimodal speech and metadata remotely for early detection of cognitive impairment, with high classification accuracy.

Findings

Achieved an F1-score of 0.873 in classifying cognitive impairment.

Demonstrated effectiveness of large language models like DistilBERT for this task.

Collected a rich dataset from 126 subjects across diverse settings.

Abstract

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.