Recognition of audible disruptive behavior from people with dementia

Frequently, people with dementia exhibit abnormal behaviors that may cause self-injury or burden their caregivers. Some audible manifestations of these problematic behaviors are of vocal nature (e.g., shouting, mumbling, or cursing), others are environmental sounds (e.g., tapping or slamming). The t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Personal and ubiquitous computing 2019-02, Vol.23 (1), p.145-157
Main Authors: Beltrán, Jessica, Navarro, René, Chávez, Edgar, Favela, Jesús, Soto-Mendoza, Valeria, Ibarra, Catalina
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustics
Audio data
Background noise
Behavior
Computer Science
Dementia
Disruption
Human behavior
Human-computer interaction
Mobile Computing
Nursing homes
Original Article
Personal Computing
Pharmacology
Slamming
Social interaction
Speech recognition
User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction
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Summary:Frequently, people with dementia exhibit abnormal behaviors that may cause self-injury or burden their caregivers. Some audible manifestations of these problematic behaviors are of vocal nature (e.g., shouting, mumbling, or cursing), others are environmental sounds (e.g., tapping or slamming). The timely detection of these behaviors could enact non-pharmacological interventions which in turn can assist caregivers or prevent escalation of the disruption with other fellow residents in nursing homes. We conducted a field study in a geriatric residence to gather naturalistic data. With the participation of five residents for 203 h of observation and of the 242 incidents of problematic behaviors were registered, 85% of them had a distinctive auditory manifestation. We used a combination of standard speech detection techniques, along with a novel environmental sound recognition methodology based on the entropy of the signal. We conducted experiments using realistic data, i.e., audio immersed in natural background noise. Based on classification results with F1 score above 87%, we conclude that audible cues can be used to enact non-pharmacological interventions aimed at reducing problematic behaviors, or mitigating their negative impact.
ISSN:1617-4909
1617-4917
DOI:10.1007/s00779-018-01188-8