Challenges in Data Capturing and Collection for Physiological Detection of Dementia-Related Difficulties and Proposed Solutions

Dementia is a neurodegenerative disease which leads to the individual experiencing difficulties in their daily lives. Often these difficulties cause a large amount of stress, frustration and upset in the individual, however identifying when the difficulties are occurring or beginning can be difficult for caregivers, until the difficulty has caused problematic behavior or undeniable difficulty to the person with dementia. Therefore, a system for identifying the onset of dementia-related difficulties would be helpful in the management of dementia. Previous work highlighted wearable computing-based systems for analyzing physiological data as particularly promising. In this paper, we outline the methodology used to perform a systematic search for a relevant dataset. However, no such dataset was found. As such, a methodology for collecting such a dataset and making it publicly available is proposed, as well as for using it to train classification models that can predict difficulties from the physiological data. Several solutions to overcome the lack of available data are identified and discussed: data collection experiments to collect novel datasets; anonymization and pseudonymization to remove all identifiable data from the dataset; and synthetic data generation to produce a larger, anonymous training dataset. In conclusion, a combination of all the identified methods should ideally be employed in future solutions. Future work should focus on the conductance of the proposed experiment and the sharing of the collected data in the manner proposed, with data ideally being collected from as many people as possible with as many different types of dementia as possible

Review of Methods for Data Collection Experiments with People with Dementia and the Impact of COVID-19

The development of a wearable-based system for detecting difficulties in the daily lives of people with dementia would be highly useful in the day-to-day management of the disease. To develop such a system, it would be necessary to identify physiological indicators of the difficulties, which can be identified by analyzing physiological datasets from people with dementia. However, there is no such data available to researchers. As such, it is vital that data is collected and made available in future. In this paper we perform a review of past physiological data collection experiments conducted with people with dementia and evaluate the methods used at each stage of the experiment. Consideration is also given to the impacts and limitations imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns both on the people with dementia- such people being one of the most at risk and affected groups- and on the efficacy and safety of each of the methods. It is concluded that the choice of method to be utilized in future data collection experiments is heavily dependent on the type and severity of the dementia the participants are experiencing, and that the choice of remote or COVID-secure methods should be used during the COVID-19 pandemic; many of the methods reviewed could allow for the spread of the virus if utilized during a pandemic

Comparison of subjective and physiological stress levels in home and office work environments

Work stress is a major problem to individuals and society, with prolonged periods of stress often leading to health issues and reduced productivity. COVID-19 has increased the incidence of individuals working in a mixture of home and office-based environments, with each location presenting its own stressors. Identification of stress levels in each environment will allow individuals to better plan how to mitigate stress and boost productivity. In this project, differences in stress levels are predicted in each work environment from individuals’ physiological responses and subjectively reported stress and productivity. Initial work on the project focused upon development of a system for the detection of dementia-related difficulties through the wearable-based tracking of physiological indicators. As such, a review of the available commercial and laboratory devices available for tracking physiological indicators of dementia-related difficulties was conducted. Furthermore, no publicly available physiological dataset for predicting difficulties in dementia currently exists. However, a review of the methods for collecting such a dataset and the impact of COVID-19 found that it is impractical and potentially unethical to conduct an experiment with people with dementia during the pandemic. As such, a pivot in research was necessitated. Comparing the stress levels of individuals working in home and office environments was selected. A data collection experiment was then performed with 13 academics working in combinations of home and office environments. Descriptive statistical features were then extracted from both the physiological and questionnaire data, with the relationships between attributes and features calculated using various advanced data analytics and statistical approaches. The resultant correlation coefficients and statistical summaries of stress were used to evaluate relationships between stress and work environment at different times of day, different days of the week, and while performing different activities. A bagged tree machine learning model was trained over the data, achieving 99.3% accuracy when evaluated using 10-fold cross validation. When tested on the purely unseen instances it achieved 56% accuracy corresponding to inter-class stress classification, however a testing accuracy of 73.7% was achieved using principal component analysis for dimensionality reduction and the dataset is balanced using Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique