TIHM: An open dataset for remote healthcare monitoring in dementia.

Dementia is a progressive condition that affects cognitive and functional abilities. There is a need for reliable and continuous health monitoring of People Living with Dementia (PLWD) to improve their quality of life and support their independent living. Healthcare services often focus on addressing and treating already established health conditions that affect PLWD. Managing these conditions continuously can inform better decision-making earlier for higher-quality care management for PLWD. The Technology Integrated Health Management (TIHM) project developed a new digital platform to routinely collect longitudinal, observational, and measurement data, within the home and apply machine learning and analytical models for the detection and prediction of adverse health events affecting the well-being of PLWD. This work describes the TIHM dataset collected during the second phase (i.e., feasibility study) of the TIHM project. The data was collected from homes of 56 PLWD and associated with events and clinical observations (daily activity, physiological monitoring, and labels for health-related conditions). The study recorded an average of 50 days of data per participant, totalling 2803 days.

Home monitoring of daily living activities and prediction of agitation risk in a cohort of people living with dementia.

BACKGROUND: People living with dementia (PLWD) have an increased susceptibility to developing adverse physical and psychological events. Internet of Things (IoT) technologies provides new ways to remotely monitor patients within the comfort of their homes, particularly important for the timely delivery of appropriate healthcare. Presented here is data collated as part of the on-going UK Dementia Research Institute's Care Research and Technology Centre cohort and Technology Integrated Health Management (TIHM) study. There are two main aims to this work: first, to investigate the effect of the COVID-19 quarantine on the performance of daily living activities of PLWD, on which there is currently little research; and second, to create a simple classification model capable of effectively predicting agitation risk in PLWD, allowing for the generation of alerts with actionable information by which to prevent such outcomes. METHOD: A within-subject, date-matched study was conducted on daily living activity data using the first COVID-19 quarantine as a natural experiment. Supervised machine learning approaches were then applied to combined physiological and environmental data to create two simple classification models: a single marker model trained using ambient temperature as a feature, and a multi-marker model using ambient temperature, body temperature, movement, and entropy as features. RESULT: There are 102 PLWD total included in the dataset, with all patients having an established diagnosis of dementia, but with ranging types and severity. The COVID-19 study was carried out on a sub-group of 21 patient households. In 2020, PLWD had a significant increase in daily household activity (p = 1.40e-08), one-way repeated measures ANOVA). Moreover, there was a significant interaction between the pandemic quarantine and patient gender on night-time bed-occupancy duration (p = 3.00e-02, two-way mixed-effect ANOVA). On evaluating the models using 10-fold cross validation, both the single and multi-marker model were shown to balance precision and recall well, having F1-scores of 0.80 and 0.66, respectively. CONCLUSION: Remote monitoring technologies provide a continuous and reliable way of monitoring patient day-to-day wellbeing. The application of statistical analyses and machine learning algorithms to combined physiological and environmental data has huge potential to positively impact the delivery of healthcare for PLWD.

Harnessing the Power of Smart and Connected Health to Tackle COVID-19: IoT, AI, Robotics, and Blockchain for a Better World.

As COVID-19 hounds the world, the common cause of finding a swift solution to manage the pandemic has brought together researchers, institutions, governments, and society at large. The Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI)-including machine learning (ML) and Big Data analytics-as well as Robotics and Blockchain, are the four decisive areas of technological innovation that have been ingenuity harnessed to fight this pandemic and future ones. While these highly interrelated smart and connected health technologies cannot resolve the pandemic overnight and may not be the only answer to the crisis, they can provide greater insight into the disease and support frontline efforts to prevent and control the pandemic. This article provides a blend of discussions on the contribution of these digital technologies, propose several complementary and multidisciplinary techniques to combat COVID-19, offer opportunities for more holistic studies, and accelerate knowledge acquisition and scientific discoveries in pandemic research. First, four areas, where IoT can contribute are discussed, namely: 1) tracking and tracing; 2) remote patient monitoring (RPM) by wearable IoT (WIoT); 3) personal digital twins (PDTs); and 4) real-life use case: ICT/IoT solution in South Korea. Second, the role and novel applications of AI are explained, namely: 1) diagnosis and prognosis; 2) risk prediction; 3) vaccine and drug development; 4) research data set; 5) early warnings and alerts; 6) social control and fake news detection; and 7) communication and chatbot. Third, the main uses of robotics and drone technology are analyzed, including: 1) crowd surveillance; 2) public announcements; 3) screening and diagnosis; and 4) essential supply delivery. Finally, we discuss how distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), of which blockchain is a common example, can be combined with other technologies for tackling COVID-19.

Machine learning methods for detecting urinary tract infection and analysing daily living activities in people with dementia.

Dementia is a neurological and cognitive condition that affects millions of people around the world. At any given time in the United Kingdom, 1 in 4 hospital beds are occupied by a person with dementia, while about 22% of these hospital admissions are due to preventable causes. In this paper we discuss using Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and in-home sensory devices in combination with machine learning techniques to monitor health and well-being of people with dementia. This will allow us to provide more effective and preventative care and reduce preventable hospital admissions. One of the unique aspects of this work is combining environmental data with physiological data collected via low cost in-home sensory devices to extract actionable information regarding the health and well-being of people with dementia in their own home environment. We have worked with clinicians to design our machine learning algorithms where we focused on developing solutions for real-world settings. In our solutions, we avoid generating too many alerts/alarms to prevent increasing the monitoring and support workload. We have designed an algorithm to detect Urinary Tract Infections (UTI) which is one of the top five reasons of hospital admissions for people with dementia (around 9% of hospital admissions for people with dementia in the UK). To develop the UTI detection algorithm, we have used a Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF) technique to extract latent factors from raw observation and use them for clustering and identifying the possible UTI cases. In addition, we have designed an algorithm for detecting changes in activity patterns to identify early symptoms of cognitive decline or health decline in order to provide personalised and preventative care services. For this purpose, we have used an Isolation Forest (iForest) technique to create a holistic view of the daily activity patterns. This paper describes the algorithms and discusses the evaluation of the work using a large set of real-world data collected from a trial with people with dementia and their caregivers.

Technology integrated health management for dementia.

Pioneering advances have been made in Internet of Things technologies (IoT) in healthcare. This article describes the development and testing of a bespoke IoT system for dementia care. Technology integrated health management (TIHM) for dementia is part of the NHS England National Test Bed Programme and has involved trailing the deployment of network enabled devices combined with artificial intelligence to improve outcomes for people with dementia and their carers. TIHM uses machine learning and complex algorithms to detect and predict early signs of ill health. The premise is if changes in a person's health or routine can be identified early on, support can be targeted at the point of need to prevent the development of more serious complications.

Health management and pattern analysis of daily living activities of people with dementia using in-home sensors and machine learning techniques.

The number of people diagnosed with dementia is expected to rise in the coming years. Given that there is currently no definite cure for dementia and the cost of care for this condition soars dramatically, slowing the decline and maintaining independent living are important goals for supporting people with dementia. This paper discusses a study that is called Technology Integrated Health Management (TIHM). TIHM is a technology assisted monitoring system that uses Internet of Things (IoT) enabled solutions for continuous monitoring of people with dementia in their own homes. We have developed machine learning algorithms to analyse the correlation between environmental data collected by IoT technologies in TIHM in order to monitor and facilitate the physical well-being of people with dementia. The algorithms are developed with different temporal granularity to process the data for long-term and short-term analysis. We extract higher-level activity patterns which are then used to detect any change in patients' routines. We have also developed a hierarchical information fusion approach for detecting agitation, irritability and aggression. We have conducted evaluations using sensory data collected from homes of people with dementia. The proposed techniques are able to recognise agitation and unusual patterns with an accuracy of up to 80%.