Leveraging Unsupervised Machine Learning to Discover Patterns in Linguistic Health Summaries for Eldercare

The Center for Eldercare and Rehabilitation Technology, at University of Missouri, has researched the use of smart, unobtrusive sensors for older adult residents’ health monitoring and alerting in aging-in-place communities for many years. Sensors placed in the apartments of older adult residents generate a deluge of daily data that is automatically aggregated, analyzed, and summarized to aid in health awareness, clinical care, and research for healthy aging. When anomalies or concerning trends are detected within the data, the sensor information is converted into linguistic health messages using fuzzy computational techniques, so as to make it understandable to the clinicians. Sensor data are analyzed at the individual level, therefore, through this study we aim to discover various combinations of patterns of anomalies happening together and recurrently in the older adult’s population using these text summaries. Leveraging various computational text data processing techniques, we are able to extract relevant analytical features from the health messages. These features are transformed into a transactional encoding, then processed with frequent pattern mining techniques for association rule discovery. At individual level analysis, resident ID 3027 was considered as an exemplar to describe the analysis. Seven combinations of anomalies/rules/associations were discovered in this resident, out of which rule group three showed an increased recurrence during the COVID lockdown of facility. At the population level, a total of 38 associations were discovered that highlight the health patterns, and we continue to explore the health conditions associated with them. Ultimately, our goal is to correlate the combinations of anomalies with certain health conditions, which can then be leveraged for predictive analytics and preventative care. This will improve the current clinical care systems for older adult residents in smart sensor, aging-in-place communities.