# Digital Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease

> **NIH NIH R01** · EMORY UNIVERSITY · 2022 · $40,899

## Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is marked by progressive neuropathological changes that begin decades before
cognitive and functional symptoms, and thus efforts have been focused on developing innovative tools
and biomarkers for early identification of pre-dementia stages. To date, clinical ability to identify those with
pre-dementia stages of AD has been limited and requires expensive (amyloid PET) or invasive (lumbar
puncture) testing. However, subtle changes in connected speech may be detectable years before overt
disease symptoms present. Our team has developed an approach that uses machine learning and natural
language processing combined with advanced acoustic phonetic and lexical-semantic analyses.
Preliminary data show promise in identifying AD biomarker status and predicting 2-year cognitive
progression. In the proposed study, we leverage our success in collecting cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)
biomarkers, neuroimaging and detailed cognitive phenotyping combined with audio recordings of
participants in the Brain Stress, Hypertension and Aging Research Program cohort. This cohort, now in its
third year of follow-up, consists of 400 individuals 50 years or older with normal cognition or mild
cognitive impairment. We plan to extend this cohort of 400 participants for 3 more years to collect
additional waves of voice recordings, cognitive assessments, follow-up CSF biomarkers and
neuroimaging. Our overarching hypothesis is that the derived novel features reflecting poor lexical-
semantic connectedness or acoustic perturbations are significantly different between biomarker-positive
and -negative participants, have better diagnostic performance with regards to the ATN framework than
traditional cognitive tests and can track disease progression. The Specific Aims are: 1) Determine the
accuracy of the derived digital biomarkers in detecting in-vivo AD pathology and ATN classification in the B-
SHARP cohort; 2) Investigate the association of the derived digital biomarkers with disease progression
and cognitive decline; and 3) Investigate the ability of repeated measurement of the digital biomarkers to
track disease progression. This project will provide needed insight into the use of non-invasive digital
biomarkers to improve the ability to detect and track longitudinal changes in cognitive and functional status
in AD and will set the foundation for a future larger pivotal study.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10495200
- **Project number:** 5R01AG070861-02
- **Recipient organization:** EMORY UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** IHAB M HAJJAR
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $40,899
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2021-09-30 → 2022-07-18

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10495200

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10495200, Digital Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease (5R01AG070861-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10495200. Licensed CC0.

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