Feature Extraction Method for Clock Drawing Test

Recently, the number of elderly persons with dementia has been increasing. In the past, we proposed a dementia evaluation system using daily conversations and developed the system with a conversational robot. However, the current system is not ready for practical use because it can only evaluate time/geographical orientation and short-term memory, and some methods to evaluate other orientations and functions is required as well. In this paper, we discuss a new dementia evaluation system using not only daily conversations but also drawing tests. The authors employed a Clock Drawing Test (CDT) as a new dementia evaluation test and implemented it in a tablet device. This paper discusses a feature extraction and recognition method to distinguish normal cases from dementia cases. After evaluation experiments, the proposed method could recognize 87.6% of the clock drawing images. c © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of KES International.