Search for: All records

With the ongoing expansion of the aging population, it is increasingly critical to prioritize the safety of older drivers. The objective of this study is to utilize sensor data in order to detect early indications of impairment, thereby facilitating proactive interventions and enhancing road safety for the elderly. This article provides an overview of the research approach, presents significant results, and analyzes the consequences of utilizing in-vehicle sensors i.e. vision and telematics, to mitigate cognitive decline among elderly drivers; in doing so, it promotes progress in the domains of public health and transportation safety by standardizing the use of such devices to automatically assess the drivers’ cognitive functions. 

Given a road network and a set of trajectory data, the anomalous behavior detection (ABD) problem is to identify drivers that show significant directional deviations, hard-brakings, and accelerations in their trips. The ABD problem is important in many societal applications, including Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) detection and safe route recommendations for older drivers. The ABD problem is computationally challenging due to the large size of temporally-detailed trajectories dataset. In this paper, we propose an Edge-Attributed Matrix that can represent the key properties of temporally-detailed trajectory datasets and identify abnormal driving behaviors. Experiments using real-world datasets demonstrated that our approach identifies abnormal driving behaviors. 

Given a GPS dataset comprising driving records captured at one-second intervals, this research addresses the challenge of Abnormal Driving Detection (ADD). The study introduces an integrated approach that leverages data preprocessing, dimensionality reduction, and clustering techniques. Speed Over Ground (SOG), Course Over Ground (COG), longitude (lon), and latitude (lat) data are aggregated into minute-level segments. We use Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to reduce dimensionality, enabling K-means clustering to identify distinctive driving patterns. Results showcase the methodology's effectiveness in distinguishing normal from abnormal driving behaviors, offering promising insights for driver safety, insurance risk assessment, and personalized interventions. 

Objective: The interaction of ethnicity, progression of cognitive impairment, and neuroimaging biomarkers of Alzheimer’s Disease remains unclear. We investigated the stability in cognitive status classification (cognitively normal [CN] and mild cognitive impairment [MCI]) of 209 participants (124 Hispanics/Latinos and 85 European Americans). Methods: Biomarkers (structural MRI and amyloid PET scans) were compared between Hispanic/Latino and European American individuals who presented a change in cognitive diagnosis during the second or third follow-up and those who remained stable over time. Results: There were no significant differences in biomarkers between ethnic groups in any of the diagnostic categories. The frequency of CN and MCI participants who were progressors (progressed to a more severe cognitive diagnosis at follow-up) and non-progressors (either stable through follow-ups or unstable [progressed but later reverted to a diagnosis of CN]) did not significantly differ across ethnic groups. Progressors had greater atrophy in the hippocampus (HP) and entorhinal cortex (ERC) at baseline compared to unstable non-progressors (reverters) for both ethnic groups, and more significant ERC atrophy was observed among progressors of the Hispanic/Latino group. For European Americans diagnosed with MCI, there were 60% more progressors than reverters (reverted from MCI to CN), while among Hispanics/Latinos with MCI, there were 7% more reverters than progressors. Binomial logistic regressions predicting progression, including brain biomarkers, MMSE, and ethnicity, demonstrated that only MMSE was a predictor for CN participants at baseline. However, for MCI participants at baseline, HP atrophy, ERC atrophy, and MMSE predicted progression. 

Given GPS points on a transportation network, the goal of the Quad-tree Based Driver Classification (QBDC) problem is to identify whether drivers have Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). The QBDC problem is challenging due to the large volume and complexity of the data. This paper proposes a quad-tree based approach to the QBDC problem by analyzing driving patterns using a real-world dataset. We propose a geo-regional quad-tree structure to capture the spatial hierarchy of driving trajectories and introduce new driving features representation for input into a convolutional neural network (CNN) for driver classification. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, achieving an F1 score of 95% that significantly outperforms the baseline models. These results highlight the potential of geo-regional quad-tree structures to extract interpretable features and describe complex driving patterns. This approach offers significant implications for driver classification, with the potential to improve road safety and cognitive health monitoring. 

Cross-cultural differences in the association between neuropsychiatric symptoms and Alzheimer's disease (AD) biomarkers are not well understood. This study aimed to (1) compare depressive symptoms and frequency of reported apathy across diagnostic groups of participants with normal cognition (CN), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and dementia, as well as ethnic groups of Hispanic Americans (HA) and European Americans (EA); (2) evaluate the relationship between depression and apathy with A beta deposition and brain atrophy. Statistical analyses included ANCOVAs, chi-squared, nonparametric tests, correlations, and logistic regressions. Higher scores on the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS-15) were reported in the MCI and dementia cohorts, while older age corresponded with lower GDS-15 scores. The frequency of apathy differed across diagnoses within each ethnicity, but not when comparing ethnic groups. Reduced volume in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) significantly correlated with and predicted apathy for the total sample after applying false discovery rate corrections (FDR), controlling for covariates. The EA group separately demonstrated a significant negative relationship between apathy and superior frontal volume, while for HA, there was a relationship between rostral ACC volume and apathy. Apathy corresponded with higher A beta levels for the total sample and for the CN and HA groups. 

Abstract We examined the association between bilingualism, executive function (EF), and brain volume in older monolinguals and bilinguals who spoke English, Spanish, or both, and were cognitively normal (CN) or diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or dementia. Gray matter volume (GMV) was higher in language and EF brain regions among bilinguals, but no differences were found in memory regions. Neuropsychological performance did not vary across language groups over time; however, bilinguals exhibited reduced Stroop interference and lower scores on Digit Span Backwards and category fluency. Higher scores on Digit Span Backwards were associated with a younger age of English acquisition, and a greater degree of balanced bilingualism was associated with lower scores in category fluency. The initial age of cognitive decline did not differ between language groups. The influence of bilingualism appears to be reflected in increased GMV in language and EF regions, and to a lesser degree, in EF.