Towards Vision-based Analysis of Indoor Trajectories for Cognitive Assessment

The rapid increase of the senior population in our societies calls for innovative tools to early detect symptoms of cognitive decline. To this aim, several methods have been recently proposed that exploit Internet of Things data and artificial intelligence techniques to recognize abnormal behaviors. In particular, the analysis of position traces may enable early detection of cognitive decline. However, indoor movement analysis introduces several challenges. Indeed, indoor movements are constrained by the ambient shape and by the presence of obstacles, and are affected by variability of activity execution. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify abnormal indoor movement patterns that may indicate cognitive decline according to well known clinical models. Our method relies on trajectory segmentation, visual feature extraction from trajectory segments, and vision-based deep learning on the edge. In order to avoid privacy issues, we rely on indoor localization technologies without the use of cameras. Preliminary experimental results with a real-world dataset gathered from cognitively healthy persons and people with dementia show that this research direction is promising.