Researchers at the University of Bordeaux, working on the problem of categorizing lifestream footage from body-mounted cameras, have stumbled upon a useful application — objectively measuring the cognitive decline associated with dementia:
Doctors usually rely on the accounts given by relatives or carers whose perception of whether a patient is better or worse can be coloured by all kinds of other factors. The data from a lifestreaming camera, on the other hand, can tell you exactly how many times a patient visited the kitchen on Wednesday, for example, and how that compared to the same period six months ago.
The hope, say Karaman and co, is that this kind of data can be an important tool in evaluating the onset of dementia and the way it is advancing.
More from this lab’s research… (.pdf)
(hat tip: MIT’s Technology Review Physics arXiv blog)