Early Detection of Dementia

Early detection and prediction of dementia through unobtrusive techniques or obtrusive tests is still in exploratory status and despite the increase of interest in recent years, many challenges remain open in designing methodologies that can accurately predict its onset. This chapter addresses the problem of the early detection of dementia from two points of view: Detection based on unobtrusive paradigms both in lab and home environments (behavioral monitoring, serious games, home based assisted living applications in telemedicine) and detection based on neuroimaging approaches. The chapter also provides information on setting up ecologically valid home labs for dementia related experiments. Consequently, the aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of a complete methodology of how researchers can possibly detect or predict the onset of dementia through the current state-of-the-art, underline open challenges and illustrate future work in the field.