The Use of Home-Based Behaviours for Detecting Early Dementia: Protocol for the CUBOId Study

Introduction There is a pressing need to automatically understand the state and progression of chronic neurological diseases such as dementia. The emergence of state of the art sensing platforms offers unprecedented opportunities for indirect and automatic evaluation of disease state through the lens of behavioural monitoring. The ContinUous behavioural Biomarkers Of cognitive Impairment (CUBOId) project specifically seeks to characterise behavioural signatures of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimers disease (AD) in the early stages of the disease. Bespoke behavioural models will be introduced and deployed on a novel dataset of longitudinal sensor data from persons with MCI and AD to analyse key symptoms of the disease. Methods and analysis CUBOId is a longitudinal observational study. Participants have diagnoses of MCI or AD, and controls are their live-in partners with no such diagnosis. Multimodal activity data were passively acquired from wearables and in-home fixed sensors over timespans of 2 to 22 months. Behavioural testing is supported by neuropsychological assessment for deriving ground truths on cognitive status. Machine learning will be used to generate fused multimodal sensor data for optimisation of diagnostic and predictive performance from localisation, activity, and speech together. Ethics and dissemination CUBOId was approved by an NHS Research Ethics Committee (Wales REC; ref: 18/WA/0158) and is sponsored by the University of Bristol. It is also supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Clinical Research Network West of England. Results will be reported at conferences and in peer reviewed scientific journals. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Funding Statement This research was funded by CUBOId (UK MRC Momentum grant MC/PC/16029) and the SPHERE IRC (grant EP/K031910/1). ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below: CUBOId was approved by an NHS Research Ethics Committee (Wales REC; ref: 18/WA/0158) and is sponsored by the University of Bristol. It is also supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Clinical Research Network West of \ England. Results will be reported at conferences and in peer-reviewed scientific journals. I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable. Yes All data produced in the present study are available upon reasonable request to the authors.