Publication
Leveraging Motion and Location Tracking for Supporting Cognitive State and Behavior Analysis
Agne Grünerbl
PhD-Thesis, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, 1/2020.
Abstract
Activity recognition has continued to be a large field in computer science over the last two decades. Research questions from 15 years ago have led to solutions that today support our daily lives. Specifically, the success of smartphones or more recent developments of other smart devices (e.g., smart-watches) is rooted in applications that leverage on activity analysis and location tracking (fitness applications and maps). Today we can track our physical health and fitness and support our physical needs by merely owning (and using) a smart-phone. Still, the quality of our lives does not solely rely on fitness and physical health but also more increasingly on our mental well-being. Since we have learned how practical and easy it is to have a lot of functions, including health support on just one device, it would be specifically helpful if we could also use the smart-phone to support our mental and cognitive health if need be. The ultimate goal of this work is to use sensor-assisted location and motion analysis to support various aspects of medically valid cognitive assessments. In this regard, this thesis builds on Hypothesis 3: Sensors in our ubiquitous environment can collect information about our cognitive state, and it is possible to extract that information. In addition, these data can be used to derive complex cognitive states and to predict possible pathological changes in humans. After all, not only is it possible to determine the cognitive state through sensors but also to assist people in difficult situations through these sensors. Thus, in the first part, this thesis focuses on the detection of mental state and state changes. The primary purpose is to evaluate possible starting points for sensor systems in order to enable a clinically accurate assessment of mental states. These assessments must work on the condition that a developed system must be able to function within the given limits of a real clinical environment. Despite the limitations and challenges of real-life deployments, it was possible to develop methods for determining the cognitive state and well-being of the residents. The analysis of the location data provides a correct classification of cognitive state with an average accuracy of 70% to 90%. Methods to determine the state of bipolar patients provide an accuracy of 70-80\% for the detection of different cognitive states (total seven classes) using single sensors and 76% for merging data from different sensors. Methods for detecting the occurrence of state changes, a highlight of this work, even achieved a precision and recall of 95%. The comparison of these results with currently used standard methods in psychiatric care even shows a clear advantage of the sensor-based method. The accuracy of the sensor-based analysis is 60% higher than the accuracy of the currently used methods. The second part of this thesis introduces methods to support people’s actions in stressful situations on the one hand and analyzes the interaction between people during high-pressure activities on the other. A simple, acceleration based, smartwatch instant feedback application was used to help laypeople to learn to perform CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) in an emergency on the fly. The evaluation of this application in a study with 43 laypersons showed an instant improvement in the CPR performance of 50%. An investigation of whether training with such an instant feedback device can support improved learning and lead to more permanent effects for gaining skills was able to confirm this theory. Last but not least, with the main interest shifting from the individual to a group of people at the end of this work, the question: how can we determine the interaction between individuals within a group of people? was answered by developing a methodology to detect un-voiced collaboration in random ad-hoc groups. An evaluation with data retrieved from video footage provides an accuracy of up to more than 95%, and even with artificially introduced errors rates of 20%, still an accuracy of 70% precision, and 90% recall can be achieved. All scenarios in this thesis address different practical issues of today’s health care. The methods developed are based on real-life datasets and real-world studies.