Establishing computational behavioural models for the detection of early dementia from speech

Supervisors:  Dr Raul Santos-Rodriguez, Department of Engineering Mathematics Dr Elizabeth Coulthard, Bristol Medical School Professor Yoav Ben-Shlomo, Bristol Population Health Science Institute Email: dan.kumpik@bristol.ac.uk

‌Project summary:

I am interested in applying machine learning to the early diagnosis and tracking of Alzheimer’s dementia by fusing multimodal data from in-home sensor arrays. My PhD project, part of the SPHERE/CUBOiD collaboration at Bristol University, will use computational models to explore how changes in natural speech reflect behavioural disturbances in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and early Alzheimer’s disease. I will examine a) how variability in features of natural speech relates to disruptions in biomarkers of daily living activities (such as sleep and locomotion patterns) and b) how behavioural and speech features co-evolve with disease progression. By fusing neuropsychological, speech and behavioural sensor data to create enriched feature sets, I aim to build optimised pipelines for early classification of MCI and Alzheimer’s disease from natural speech alone. The overarching aim of this project is to predict future progression to Alzheimer’s disease from passively-acquired natural speech. 

General profile:

I have experience in social care, behavioural neuropharmacology and audiovisual psychophysics- and now, in digital health. In my spare time I am a musician, sound engineer and producer, and have side interests in astrophysics and cosmology.  

Publications:

• Chinareva, S., Jones, J., Tumia, N., Kumpik, D., Shah, P., & Everitt, A. (2020). Lotus: Mediating mindful breathing. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.338293
• Kumpik, D. P., Campbell, C., Schnupp, J. W. H., & King, A. J. (2019). Re-weighting of Sound Localization Cues by Audiovisual Training. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 13, 1164. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2019.01164
• Kumpik, D. P., & King, A. J. (2019). A review of the effects of unilateral hearing loss on spatial hearing. In Hearing Research (Vol. 372, pp. 17–28). Elsevier B.V. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2018.08.003
• Kumpik, D. P., Roberts, H. E., King, A. J., & Bizley, J. K. (2014). Visual sensitivity is a stronger determinant of illusory processes than auditory cue parameters in the sound-induced flash illusion. Journal of Vision, 14(7), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1167/14.7.12
• Kumpik, D. P., Kacelnik, O., & King, A. J. (2010). Adaptive reweighting of auditory localization cues in response to chronic unilateral earplugging in humans. Journal of Neuroscience, 30(14), 4883–4894. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5488-09.2010
• Kumpik, D., Ting, J., Campbell, R. A. A., Schnupp, J. W. H., & King, A. J. (2009). Specificity of binaural perceptual learning for amplitude modulated tones: A comparison of two training methods. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 125(4), 2221–2232. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3082102