Predicting MMSE Score from Finger-Tapping Measurement

Dementia is a leading cause of diseases for the elderly. Early diagnosis is very important for the elderly living with dementias. In this paper, we propose a method for dementia diagnosis by predicting MMSE score from finger-tapping measurement with machine learning pipeline. Based on measurement of finger tapping movement, the pipeline is first to select finger-tapping attributes with copula entropy and then to predict MMSE score from the selected attributes with predictive models. Experiments on real world data show that the predictive models such developed present good prediction performance. As a byproduct, the associations between certain finger-tapping attributes (Number of taps and SD of inter-tapping interval) and MMSE score are discovered with copula entropy, which may be interpreted as the biological relationship between cognitive ability and motor ability and therefore makes the predictive models explainable. The selected finger-tapping attributes can be considered as dementia biomarkers.