Deep Learning-Based Detection of Cognitive Impairment from Passive Smartphone Sensing with Routine-Aware Augmentation and Demographic Personalization

Abstract

Early detection of cognitive impairment is critical for timely diagnosis and intervention, yet infrequent clinical assessments often lack the sensitivity and temporal resolution to capture subtle cognitive declines in older adults. Passive smartphone sensing has emerged as a promising approach for naturalistic and continuous cognitive monitoring. Building on this potential, we implemented a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to detect cognitive impairment from sequences of daily behavioral features, derived from multimodal sensing data collected in an ongoing one-year study of older adults. Our key contributions are two techniques to enhance model generalizability across participants: (1) routine-aware augmentation, which generates synthetic sequences by replacing each day with behaviorally similar alternatives, and (2) demographic personalization, which reweights training samples to emphasize those from individuals demographically similar to the test participant. Evaluated on 6-month data from 36 older adults, these techniques jointly improved the Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC) of the model trained on sensing and demographic features from 0.637 to 0.766, highlighting the potential of scalable monitoring of cognitive impairment in aging populations with passive sensing.