Differences in the way healthy and cognitively impaired individuals used their smartphones were enough to tell them apart.
How they did it: Apple researchers monitored the app usage of 113 adults between the ages of 60 and 75 over 12 weeks. Thirty-one of them had clinically diagnosed cognitive impairment; 82 were healthy. For every session—from the moment users unlocked their phones to the moment they locked them again—the researchers logged the sequences of apps used and categorized the sessions into different types. The data was used to train a machine-learning model.
The results: The model was able to distinguish healthy from cognitively impaired users roughly 80% of the time, or 30% more often than chance. The results also showed that the context in which apps were used was important to the model’s prediction. An app like Messages used alone, for example, was strongly associated with a healthy individual, but used together with Mail was more strongly associated with a cognitively impaired individual.
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