METHOD AND SYSTEM OF LONGITUDINAL DETECTION OF DEMENTIA THROUGH LEXICAL AND SYNTACTIC CHANGES IN WRITING

摘要

The present invention is a method and system for detecting linguistic markers as signs and indicators of mental illness, even prior to onset of symptoms of the mental illness. The linguistic markers may be detected in diachronic analyses of writing or speech samples. In particular, the present invention may identify lexical and syntactic changes in language due to mental illness. To recognize such changes the present invention may utilize complete, fully parsed texts or speech representing a number of measures. The identification of markers may provide a means of detecting mental illness early on based on a person's use of language. The language may be presented as spontaneous speech or writing, and may include samples of speech and/or writing occurring over time.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented method of detecting or diagnosing cognitive deficit or mental illness comprising the steps of:
(a) utilizing one or more computers, or an interconnected network of computers, for collecting two or more speech or text samples from a subject, and to determine a date for each sample and place the samples in a timeline based on the date for each sample; (b) utilizing one or more computers, or an interconnected network of computers, to apply to the samples or to a portion of the samples one or more analytical operations, each analytical operation relating to a linguistic or syntactic operation for analyzing linguistic expression to detect one or more linguistic markers constituting indicators of the cognitive deficit or mental illness, thereby generating analysis results for each analytical operation; (c) analyzing the text samples and the timeline so as to determine the rate of change over time across the samples for each analytical operation, and thereby generating rate of change results for each analytical operation; and (d) aggregating the rate of change results, and analyzing the aggregated rate of change results for the subject in order to generate early detection information or diagnosis information for the cognitive deficit of mental illness.