Language-related features for early detection of Alzheimer Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most leading symptom of neurodegenerative dementia; AD is defined now as one of the most costly chronic diseases. For that automatic diagnosis and control of Alzheimer’s disease may have a significant effect on society along with patient well-being. Language disorder is regarded to be among the most common symptoms of AD, as a direct and natural result of cognitive impairment. Hence, the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease using speech-based features is gaining growing attention. The aim of this study is to extract linguistic features following a proposed taxonomy of language impairment of AD patients. Obtained results indicate that the proposed taxonomy of the linguistic features extracted from the speech samples can be used to differentiate between Alzheimer’s disease patients and the healthy control group. Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier obtained classification accuracy over 90 percent.