Towards an Automatic Speech-Based Diagnostic Test for Alzheimer’s Disease

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is widely used in many applications and tools. Smartphones, video games, and cars are a few examples where people use ASR routinely and often daily. A less commonly used, but potentially very important arena for using ASR, is the health domain. For some people, the impact on life could be enormous. The goal of this work is to develop an easy-to-use, non-invasive, inexpensive speech-based diagnostic test for dementia that can easily be applied in a clinician’s office or even at home. While considerable work has been published along these lines, increasing dramatically recently, it is primarily of theoretical value and not yet practical to apply. A large gap exists between current scientific understanding, and the creation of a diagnostic test for dementia. The aim of this paper is to bridge this gap between theory and practice by engineering a practical test. Experimental evidence suggests that strong discrimination between subjects with a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer’s vs. matched normal controls can be achieved with a combination of acoustic features from speech, linguistic features extracted from a transcription of the speech, and results of a mini mental state exam. A fully automatic speech recognition system tuned for the speech-to-text aspect of this application, including automatic punctuation, is also described.