Acoustic Biomarkers for Alzheimer's Disease Detection from Spontaneous Speech

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains a major public health challenge, and early identification is crucial for timely intervention and care planning. Recent work has shown that speech-based digital biomarkers can capture subtle changes in vocal production, prosody, and timing that often precede or accompany cognitive decline. In this study, we investigate whether acoustic features extracted from spontaneous speech can reliably distinguish individuals with AD from healthy controls. Using a structured speech dataset derived from the Cookie Theft picture-description task, we extract clinically informative low-level descriptors spanning prosodic, spectral, and temporal domains, and evaluate a range of machine learning classifiers. Our results indicate that acoustic biomarkers carry strong discriminative value, with the best-performing models achieving clinically meaningful separation between diagnostic groups. These findings support the use of non-invasive, low-cost audio-based screening tools and motivate further work on multimodal and longitudinal assessment frameworks for dementia risk detection.