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Assistant Professor of Computer Science  is leading a four-year $1,179,714  project to use Voice Assistant Systems, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, to detect early cognitive impairment. Early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in older adults living alone is essential for developing, planning, and ensuring adequate support at home for patients and their families.

“We are tackling a significant and complicated data-science question: whether the collection of long-term speech patterns of individuals at home will enable us to develop new speech-analysis methods for early detection of this challenging disease,” Liang said. “Our team envisions that the changes in the speech patterns of individuals using the voice assistant systems may be sensitive to their decline in memory and function over time.”

Liang is the principal investigator on the NIA grant. The other core team members are John A. Batsis, MD, a Dartmouth-Hitchcock geriatrician and associate professor of medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and Robert Roth, a Dartmouth-Hitchcock neuropsychologist and associate professor of psychiatry at Geisel. Additional collaborators include Brian MacWhinney, a professor of psychology and modern languages at Carnegie Mellon University, and David Kotz, the International Paper Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. �����о��� Boston’s share of the grant is $596,844.

“Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias are a major public health concern that lead to high health costs, risk of nursing home placement, and place an inordinate burden on the whole family,” Batsis said. “The ability to plan in the early stages of the disease is essential for initiating interventions and providing support systems to improve patients’ everyday function and quality of life.”

The core team will conduct an 18-month laboratory evaluation and a 28-month home evaluation with a focus on whether a Voice Assistant System’s tasks and features can measure and predict an individual’s cognitive decline in the home over time.

The team will use machine and deep learning techniques and collect data on patient participants to provide feedback to patients, caregivers, and clinicians. If it’s a success, the team will do widespread testing.

The NIA grant started September 30, 2019 and runs through May 31, 2023. Liang will have two full-time PhD students working on this project for all four years. One master’s student and one undergraduate student are also working in his lab for this project.

This is Liang’s fifth year as a professor at �����о��� Boston.