Fuzzy estimation system of dementia severity using biological information during sleep

Recently, the increase of care burden due to the increase of number of the elderly dementia patients is a matter of concern in Japan. However, dementia of the elderly tends to be wrongly recognized as the effect of aging, and there are many cases in which early detection are difficult. In this paper, we focus on the cognitive impairment as one of the core symptoms of dementia, and propose the fuzzy estimation system to detect the level of dementia through monitoring the participants´ sleep using air pressure and ultrasonic sensor systems which were developed by our laboratory. As a result of applying this method to twenty-three women in a nursing home, we could confirm the high correlation between the degree of dementia and the truth value, the score of Revised Hasegawa´s dementia scale.