New artificial intelligence system can detect dementia

Japanese scientists say they have developed a novel machine-learning technique that can detect dementia with over 90 per cent accuracy from conversations between humans and avatars on a computer. This technique developed by a team from Osaka University and Nara Institute of Science and Technology involves learning characteristics of sounds of elderly people who answer easy questions. Dementia could be distinguished by combining features of the disorder, such as delay in response to questions from avatars depending on the content of questions, intonation, articulation rate of the voice, and the percentage of nouns and verbs in utterance. An avatar is the graphical representation of the user or a character in an internet forum. "If this technology is further developed, it will become possible to know whether or not an elderly individual is in the early stages of dementia through conversation with computer avatars at home on a daily basis," said researcher Takashi Kudo.