Early dementia detection through conversations to virtual personal assistant

Early detection of dementia are important because it can slow down the progress of the disease. One of the popular way to detect dementia is based on cognitive tests. The tests are usually done in the clinical setup with the help of a psycho-metrically trained examiner. Revised Hasegawas Dementia Scale (HDS-R) is one of the prominent screening tests for dementia. We propose a method for early dementia detection by using a Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA) on a computer that has a natural language user interface, such as Amazon Echo, Apple Siri, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, Softbank Pepper, Sharp RoBoHon, etc. In our proposal, we consider HDS-R as a guideline to examine dementia. A VPA extracts the necessary features from the verbal and interactive response of the patient to compute the level of dementia. Such implicit checking is physically and mentally much comfortable for old people. We believe the proposed method will be able to contribute future society.