Researchers hope voice assistants can spot signs of dementia

An effort to use voice-assistant devices like Amazon's Alexa to detect signs of memory problems in people has gotten a boost with a grant from the federal government. Researchers from Dartmouth-Hitchcock and the University of Massachusetts Boston will get a four-year $1.2 million grant from the National Institute on Aging. The team hopes to develop a system that would use machine and deep learning techniques to detect changes in speech patterns to determine if someone is a risk of developing dementia or Alzheimer's. "We are tackling a significant and complicated data-science question: whether the collection of long-term speech patterns of individuals at home will enable us to develop new speech-analysis methods for early detection of this challenging disease," Xiaohui Liang, an assistant professor of computer science from the University of Massachusetts Boston, said in a statement. "Our team envisions that the changes in the speech patterns of individuals using the voice assistant systems may be sensitive to their decline in memory and function over time."