Detecting Wandering Behavior of People with Dementia
This addresses a safety issue for people with dementia, but it is incremental as it builds on existing GPS and anomaly detection methods.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting wandering behavior in people with dementia to prevent dangerous situations, and the result was a GPS-based approach that achieved up to AUC = 0.99 in experiments on synthetic data, outperforming a state-of-the-art method.
Wandering is a problematic behavior in people with dementia that can lead to dangerous situations. To alleviate this problem we design an approach for the real-time automatic detection of wandering leading to getting lost. The approach relies on GPS data to determine frequent locations between which movement occurs and a step that transforms GPS data into geohash sequences. Those can be used to find frequent and normal movement patterns in historical data to then be able to determine whether a new on-going sequence is anomalous. We conduct experiments on synthetic data to test the ability of the approach to find frequent locations and to compare it against an alternative, state-of-the-art approach. Our approach is able to identify frequent locations and to obtain good performance (up to AUC = 0.99 for certain parameter settings) outperforming the state-of-the-art approach.