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Three years ago, Eli Lilly, Apple, and California-based health and measurement company Evidation Health came together to ask a new kind of research question: Can we identify cognitive impairment by analyzing the many types of digital data people inadvertently generate in their everyday lives?
For 12 weeks in 2018, more than 100 people with varying states of cognitive decline—or none at all—used an iPhone, an Apple Watch, an iPad pro with a smart keyboard, and a Beddit sleep monitoring device. Each of these devices contains various sensors such as gyroscopes, pedometers, accelerometers, heart rate monitors, and sleep sensors. The iPad also administered language and motor control tests on a biweekly basis. Throughout the study period, participants talked, slept, worked, cleaned, and socialized as their digital biomarker data streams flowed to a cloud-based server viewed by researchers at the study headquarters at Evidation in San Mateo.
The ...
