Predicting Parkinson's Disease with Multimodal Irregularly Collected Longitudinal Smartphone Data
This work addresses remote health assessment for elderly individuals with Parkinson's Disease, but it is incremental as it builds on existing multimodal and attention-based methods.
The researchers tackled the problem of predicting Parkinson's Disease using noisy, irregularly collected smartphone data by proposing a time-series approach with attention modules, achieving improved prediction performance as demonstrated on a large public dataset.
Parkinsons Disease is a neurological disorder and prevalent in elderly people. Traditional ways to diagnose the disease rely on in-person subjective clinical evaluations on the quality of a set of activity tests. The high-resolution longitudinal activity data collected by smartphone applications nowadays make it possible to conduct remote and convenient health assessment. However, out-of-lab tests often suffer from poor quality controls as well as irregularly collected observations, leading to noisy test results. To address these issues, we propose a novel time-series based approach to predicting Parkinson's Disease with raw activity test data collected by smartphones in the wild. The proposed method first synchronizes discrete activity tests into multimodal features at unified time points. Next, it distills and enriches local and global representations from noisy data across modalities and temporal observations by two attention modules. With the proposed mechanisms, our model is capable of handling noisy observations and at the same time extracting refined temporal features for improved prediction performance. Quantitative and qualitative results on a large public dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.