Mathieu Gagnon

Automatic Identification of Behavior Patterns in Mild Cognitive Impairments and Alzheimer's Disease Based on Activities of Daily Living

The growing number of older adults worldwide places high pressure on identifying dementia at its earliest stages so that early management and intervention strategies could be planned. In this study, we proposed a machine learning based method for automatic identification of behavioral patterns of people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) through the analysis of data related to their activities of daily living (ADL) collected in two smart home environments. Our method employs first a feature selection technique to extract relevant features for classification and reduce the dimensionality of the data. Then, the output of the feature selection is fed into a random forest classifier for classification. We recruited three groups of participants in our study: healthy older adults, older adults with mild cognitive impairment and older adults with Alzheimer’s disease. We conducted extensive experiments to validate our proposed method. We experimentally showed that our method outperforms state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms.

Maintaining good relationships in clinical setting: the bonus DOMUS project

The DOMUS laboratory has recently participated in the construction of a brand new residence for persons with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). This building which comprises six apartments, and four bedrooms is equipped with the latest smart home technology (sensors, effectors, etc.). It is a living lab where prototype software, algorithms and technologies can be deployed for long term evaluation. One of the challenges that we have to face in a living lab setting is the maintaining of the good relationships with both the professionals and the residents. In that regard, the DOMUS team worked toward implementing simple technological services that would rapidly and directly enhance social participation and the quality of life of the residents. The goal is also to motivate them into taking part of the various research projects and to establish a trust relationship. In this paper, we present the Bonus DOMUS, a project that was created toward these aims. It enables the residents to have customized alarms and motivational messages.

L’observation des manifestations de la compétence discursive à l’oral dans le cadre de dialogues philosophiques au secondaire

La dimension discursive de la communication orale en contexte scolaire demeure, a l’heure actuelle, peu appuyee sur des bases empiriques. En reponse a ce manque, nous retracerons le processus d’elaboration d’un cadre d’analyse des manifestations de la competence discursive a l’oral dans le contexte de dialogues philosophiques. Pour ce faire, nous presenterons les resultats de la mise a l’epreuve empirique de certains indicateurs d’une grille synthese issue de notre recension d’ecrits. Enfin, nous discuterons du caractere situe de la competence discursive, en lien avec notre contexte d’investigation.