Early Detection of Low Cognitive Scores from Dual-task Performance Data Using a Spatio-temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Network

Detecting low cognitive scores at an early stage is important for delaying the progress of dementia. Investigations of early-stage detection have employed automatic assessment using dual-task (i.e., performing two different tasks simultaneously). However, current approaches to dual-task-based detection are based on either simple features or limited motion information, which degrades the detection accuracy. To address this problem, we proposed a framework that uses graph convolutional networks to extract spatio-temporal features from dual-task performance data. Moreover, to make the proposed method robust against data imbalance, we devised a loss function that directly optimizes the summation of the sensitivity and specificity of the detection of low cognitive scores (i.e., score≤ 23 or score≤ 27). Our evaluation is based on 171 subjects from 6 different senior citizens’ facilities. Our experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm considerably outperforms the previous standard with respect to both the sensitivity and specificity of the detection of low cognitive scores.