Speech-Based Digital Biomarkers for Alzheimer's Research

Abstract

Digital biomarkers are of growing interest in the field of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) research. Digital biomarker data arising from digital health tools holds various potential benefits: more objective and more accurate assessment of patients' symptoms and remote collection of signals in real-world scenarios but also multimodal variance for prediction models of individual disease progression. Speech can be collected at minimal patient burden and provides rich data for assessing multiple aspects of AD pathology including cognition. However, the operations around collecting, preparing, and validly interpreting speech data within the context of clinical research on AD remains complex and sometimes challenging. Through a dedicated pipeline of speech collection tools, preprocessing steps and algorithms, precise qualification and quantification of an AD patient's pathology can be achieved from their speech. The aim of this chapter is to describe the methods that are needed to create speech collection scenarios that result in valuable speech-based digital biomarkers for clinical research.