Speaking to a robot could flag early warning signs of dementia

“Dementia severity is associated with a limited vocabulary and increased word repetitions giving patterns we can pick up as linguistic biomarkers as dementia progresses,” Mr Alkenani said.

“Our study analysed language samples from DementiaBank, a large open-source database of language samples from people with various stages of cognitive impairment and dementia.”

Advanced dementia is often associated with limited vocabulary and repeated words, and as dementia advances a person’s language comprehension and spoken complexity often declines.

The researchers looked at 236 language samples from people diagnosed with probable Alzheimer’s dementia (AD), 43 samples from people with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), 21 samples belonging to people…