in Japan, body movement tracking algorithms used to identify people with dementia

One in five people over the age of 65 are now affected by dementia in Japan. To help better identify the first signs of the disease or find patients who may have gotten lost, the company Ridgeline has just created a new platform based on artificial intelligence. The idea is to identify the very specific movements of people suffering from Alzheimer’s in the city.

This company, which is a subsidiary of the giant Fujitsu, first worked on a program which makes it possible to better judge the movements that gymnasts make during major competitions. For the moment, the marks are given by humans but Fujitsu has worked with the international gymnastics federation on a platform capable of analyzing the quality of athletes’ movements. Several cameras follow the movements of several points of the gymnast’s body and then compare their performance, using artificial intelligence, with the perfect theoretical movements. The score can thus be fairer. Fujitsu and Ridgeline want to apply these body movement tracking algorithms to medicine and particularly to the identification of people suffering from dementia.

Specialists explain that Alzheimer’s patients have very particular gestures. The engineers therefore followed patients to identify their movements and identify gestures that are different from those who do not suffer from this pathology. Patients suffering from, for example, dementia have a clean gait with much shorter steps than normal and often rubbing of the feet on the ground.

Finding lost patients

The company proposes to deploy its solutions on surveillance cameras in cities or at store entrances to automatically identify these particular movements. All this is also done with artificial intelligence. The platform will analyze a gigantic quantity of images and data live and be able to signal the presence of a person potentially suffering. The group has just started testing, but the idea is either to allow social services to then talk to the person to check that everything is okay or to find out if they are aware of their cognitive condition. This could also make it possible to find patients who get lost each year while going for a run or a walk.

Over the last fiscal year in Japan, authorities were contacted 18,700 times for cases of people with dementia who had gotten lost. Fortunately, 75% are found within the day. There were also deaths among these lost people and 284 people whose trace was never found. This is where artificial intelligence could be mobilized.