“Dear Diary” uses a technology already available in most homes - the telephone - to conduct an automatic, remote cognitive assessment using voice data. Several characteristics of speech, such as temporal features and acoustic properties, have been found to be indicative of cognitive function.
Tasks to measure these features along with gold standard cognitive measures have been incorporated into the Dear Diary Telephone Interview.
This interview uses an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology to provide an automated experience. Interview guides are currently in use for those tasks that require visual stimuli and much of the speech feature extraction has been automated. The assessment technology has been designed with user experience in mind. Significant effort has been devoted to user interviews with older persons.