Balance Measures Derived from Insole Sensor Differentiate Prodromal
  Dementia with Lewy Bodies
Masatomo Kobayashi Yasunori Yamada Kaoru Shinkawa Miyuki Nemoto Miho Ota Kiyotaka Nemoto Tetsuaki Arai
Dementia with Lewy bodies is the second most common type of neurodegenerative
dementia, and identification at the prodromal stage$-$i.e., mild cognitive
impairment due to Lewy bodies (MCI-LB)$-$is important for providing appropriate
care. However, MCI-LB is often underrecognized because of its diversity in
clinical manifestations and similarities with other conditions such as mild
cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer's disease (MCI-AD). In this study, we
propose a machine learning-based automatic pipeline that helps identify MCI-LB
by exploiting balance measures acquired with an insole sensor during a 30-s
standing task. An experiment with 98 participants (14 MCI-LB, 38 MCI-AD, 46
cognitively normal) showed that the resultant models could discriminate MCI-LB
from the other groups with up to 78.0% accuracy (AUC: 0.681), which was 6.8%
better than the accuracy of a reference model based on demographic and clinical
neuropsychological measures. Our findings may open up a new approach for timely
identification of MCI-LB, enabling better care for patients.