UD’s DementiaBank outshines global competitors, driving machine-learning advances in early dementia prediction. Alyssa Lanzi, assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders (CSCD) in UD’s College of Health Sciences, leads efforts to expand and diversify DementiaBank, a shared database of multimedia interactions for studying communication in dementia.
DementiaBank breaks down how vocabulary changes over time and introduces disfluencies, including stutters, pauses, and changes in pitch, this research evolve into a product that can help detect Alzheimer’s 20 years earlier in a way that’s cost-effective and accessible for everyone. Current diagnostic tools for detection, like MRI, are costly and invasive, that language, while not a single predictor, could be a powerful piece of the puzzle.
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