skip to main content


Search for: All records

Creators/Authors contains: "Schmitter-Edgecombe, Maureen"

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. New modes of technology are offering unprecedented opportunities to unobtrusively collect data about people's behavior. While there are many use cases for such information, we explore its utility for predicting multiple clinical assessment scores. Because clinical assessments are typically used as screening tools for impairment and disease, such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI), automatically mapping behavioral data to assessment scores can help detect changes in health and behavior across time. In this article, we aim to extract behavior markers from two modalities, a smart home environment and a custom digital memory notebook app, for mapping to 10 clinical assessments that are relevant for monitoring MCI onset and changes in cognitive health. Smart-home-based behavior markers reflect hourly, daily, and weekly activity patterns, while app-based behavior markers reflect app usage and writing content/style derived from free-form journal entries. We describe machine learning techniques for fusing these multimodal behavior markers and utilizing joint prediction. We evaluate our approach using three regression algorithms and data from 14 participants with MCI living in a smart-home environment. We observed moderate to large correlations between predicted and ground-truth assessment scores, ranging from r = 0.601 to r = 0.871 for each clinical assessment. 
    more » « less
  2. In this study, we introduce and validate a computational method to detect lifestyle change that occurs in response to a multi-domain healthy brain aging intervention. To detect behavior change, digital behavior markers are extracted from smartwatch sensor data and a permutation-based change detection algorithm quantifies the change in marker-based behavior from a pre-intervention, 1-week baseline. To validate the method, we verify that changes are successfully detected from synthetic data with known pattern differences. Next, we employ this method to detect overall behavior change for n = 28 brain health intervention subjects and n = 17 age-matched control subjects. For these individuals, we observe a monotonic increase in behavior change from the baseline week with a slope of 0.7460 for the intervention group and a slope of 0.0230 for the control group. Finally, we utilize a random forest algorithm to perform leave-one-subject-out prediction of intervention versus control subjects based on digital marker delta values. The random forest predicts whether the subject is in the intervention or control group with an accuracy of 0.87. This work has implications for capturing objective, continuous data to inform our understanding of intervention adoption and impact. 
    more » « less
  3. null (Ed.)