Predicting Aggressive Responsive Behaviour Among People with Dementia

Abstract

Patients with dementia will have difficulty properly communicating life’s challenges which can cause them to become agitated, resulting in verbal or physical aggression. Monitoring the risk of a resident harming themselves or others due to aggressive behaviour is a priority within a long-term care facility where dementia is present. Caregivers at long term care facilities record resident health and behaviour digitally either as structured data or unstructured text, providing an on-going log of each resident’s patient history. We aim to use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques to develop models that can predict the probability of a resident exhibiting aggressive behaviours that may harm themselves or others within the next week.