Quantification of Advanced Dementia Patients’ Engagement in Therapeutic Sessions: An Automatic Video Based Approach using Computer Vision and Machine Learning

Most individuals with advanced dementia lose the ability to communicate with the outside world through speech. This limits their ability to participate in social activities crucial to their well-being and quality of life. However, there is mounting evidence that individuals with advanced dementia can still communicate non-verbally and benefit greatly from these interactions. A major problem in facilitating the advancement of this research is of a practical and methodical nature: assessing the success of treatment is currently done by humans, prone to subjective bias and inconsistency, and it involves laborious and time consuming effort. The present work is the first attempt at exploring if automatic (artificial intelligence based) quantification of the degree of patient engagement in Adaptive Interaction sessions, a highly promising intervention developed to improve the quality of life of nonverbal individuals with advanced dementia. Hence we describe a framework which uses computer vision and machine learning as a potential first step towards answering this question. Using a real-world data set of videos of therapeutic sessions, not acquired specifically for the purposes of the present work, we demonstrate highly promising results.