Keywords
Digital Measures · Ageing · Digital Biomarkers · Remote-Monitoring · Digital Behaviorome · Older Adults
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1 Introduction1
Modern sensor technologies are increasingly used to obtain health information in remote-monitoring settings [1]. While2
no commonly accepted nomenclature exists when referring to sensor-derived health information, we try to adhere to3
recommendations set out by Goldsack et al. [ 2, 3]. As such, we use the term ‘digital measure’ to broadly describe4
any sensor-derived measurement of health. Applications of digital measures in general can be diverse, ranging from5
providing novel endpoints in clinical trials [ 4] over healthcare monitoring [ 5] to wellness monitoring with fitness6
trackers. Following Goldsack et al., meanwhile, we use the term ‘digital biomarkers’ to refer to individual digital7
measures that apply an easy-to-grasp concept and are strongly correlated to a known measurement of disease [2, 3].8
An example of this is the number of steps per day, as measured by a digital device, which has been shown to be9
strongly associated with cardiovascular disease and mortality [6]. We use the term ‘digital clinical outcome assessment’10
(COA) for digital measures that describe how a patient feels, functions, or survives [2, 3]. This latter type of digital11
measure may utilise different sensor modalities and other digital measures without necessitating the measurement of an12
underlying physical concept. For instance, digital measures of gait and finger-tapping might be used to build a machine13
learning-derived digital Parkinson’s disease severity measure [7].14
15
While much recent interest in this area has centred on the use of digital measures in clinical trials, another traditional16
field of application has been in technology-assisted ageing and ageing-related research. With the rapid ageing of17
many countries’ populations, age-related social and economic challenges are starting to gain prominence [8, 9]. In18
this area, modern information technology may help solve, or at least alleviate, some of the associated negative effects19
of societal ageing, such as steadily increasing healthcare costs [ 10, 11]. Moreover, digital measures could provide20
information about an individual’s functional status and health changes, thereby facilitating earlier and more personalised21
interventions that may eventually allow older adults to remain independent for longer and increase their quality of22
life [5]. Although limited to the efforts of just a few research groups, research in this direction has been ongoing for23
more than a decade, amounting to numerous successful studies around the world [12, 5, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20].24
For instance, Rantz et al. show how sensor technologies linked to early alert systems led to better health outcomes25
among older adults [5]. Furthermore, Hayes et al. demonstrate that variations in sensor-derived gait speed and physical26
activity differ significantly between older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and healthy older adults [18].27
Meanwhile, in our own research, we recently found that nightly movements in bed may be a promising digital measure;28
with further validation, these movements could potentially constitute a digital biomarker for monitoring signs of early29
health deteriorations in older adults [ 16]. In another line of research, Piau et al. have demonstrated how in-home30
walking speed may be a potential digital biomarker for fall risk among older adults [ 21]. Furthermore, Austin et al.31
report that digital measures were used successfully to assess loneliness in a study with 16 older adults [22].32
In addition to directly improving health outcomes by means of early detection of health issues, digital measures in33
ageing research may also enable novel insights into ageing and ageing-related conditions [23].34
35
Sensor technology used in populations of older adults is commonly unobtrusive or even contactless, with minimal to36
no participant interaction and the goal to minimises privacy intrusion. These sensor technologies contrast with the37
predominant use of wearable devices employed to derive digital measures in clinical research. There are multiple38
reasons for this: (1) older adults tend to be more wary of novel technologies [24]; (2) since monitoring durations are39
potentially very long or even unlimited, it is ideal if there is no interaction with the system, as there is evidence of40
wear-time-dependent compliance issues [ 25]; (3) there is a certain stigma attached to the use of wearable devices,41
whereby many older adults tend to fear being seen as frail if they wear a device – even if it is just an alarm clock [24];42
(4) for users with potential memory issues, wearing and maintaining devices may not be feasible. Due to these factors,43
most long-term research using sensor technology with older adults has focused on unobtrusive and cost-effective44
contactless devices [18, 13, 5, 19, 23, 26, 14]. Sensors successfully used in ageing-related, real-world, long-term45
monitoring projects include passive infrared (PIR) motion sensors that capture an individual’s activity in a given room46
[5, 18, 13, 19, 23, 27], contact door sensors that can signal when a person leaves or enters the home [ 15, 26, 23],47
pressure sensors on or under a mattress that capture sleep measures [ 16, 23, 5], and electronic pillboxes to track48
medication adherence [ 28], along with potentially more obtrusive depth-sensing cameras that track silhouettes to49
detect falls and gait parameters [5]. A primary downside of using this kind of contactless, unobtrusive technologies, as50
opposed to wearables, is the additional environmental influences such sensor placement, apartment layouts or material51
properties. This may lead to more noise measurements as well as potentially worse inter-subject reliability.52
53
Currently, digital measures for ageing and other areas are commonly evaluated individually or by combining several54
specific measures based on concepts of interest. While this approach is entirely reasonable, it may limit the potential of55
digital measures. We therefore hypothesise that a more holistic approach — inspired by systems biology and applying56
2
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digital measures — may be highly promising. This involves using larger sets of digital measures, potentially in the57
hundreds to thousands, which may be particularly helpful in exploratory research and may enable the creation of58
strong digital COAs by leveraging large-scale machine learning approaches. This approach is analogous to more59
classical biological settings, where measurements can assess individual blood tests or genes (for instance, by means of60
single-nucleotide polymorphisms) as well as whole sets, such as metabolomes or genomes, to identify new phenotypes61
of health and disease. Since science is primarily informed by what it can measure [29], the introduction of a new layer62
of information such as this could potentially lead to significant new research insights [30]. In the context of unobtrusive63
and contactless technologies, this could also help to counteract some of the downsides of those technologies by basing64
algorithms on a larger set of measures, that may bring about some redundancies.65
66
In the context of digital measures, an extensive set may be called a digital behaviorome, in which the basic measurement67
unit is a digital measure – as opposed to, for instance, a gene or metabolite in a genome or metabolome, respectively. In68
this train of thought, Rashidisabet et al. define a digital behaviorome as ‘a subset of a person’s behavior measurable69
by connected devices via a systems biology approach’ [31]. However, it remains to be seen whether this definition is70
overly broad, as it would encompass measures for parameters such as vital signs, which are only indirectly related to71
behaviour. Furthermore, it should be taken into account that, unlike with biological ‘omes’, a complete set is likely72
never attainable, as there may be an infinite number of possible digital measures to be extracted, such that a digital73
behaviorome is a relatively non-exhaustive set of digital measures. Two notable real-world examples of using extensive74
sets of digital measures are studies by Cook et al. [27] and Chen et al. [32], which demonstrated the feasibility of using75
a behaviorome based on wearable and contactless sensors to predict multiple clinical scores (in the former) and mild76
cognitive impairment (in the latter).77
Building on their work, we introduce a detailed, unobtrusive digital behaviorome, constituting a non-exhaustive set of78
1268 existing and novel digital measures. We emphasise the importance of basing these measures on sensor technology79
that is evidently accepted by older adults, in addition to being affordable and feasible in real-world deployments. Thus,80
all of these measures are based on a small set of unobtrusive, contactless, and cost-effective sensors that, as shown81
by Baettie et al., scale well to large ageing-related remote-monitoring projects [ 23]; thus, these sensors should be82
compatible with most long-term monitoring projects in community-dwelling older adults.83
In this study, we make three major contributions: (1) We introduce and describe the digital measures that comprise84
the proposed unobtrusive behaviorome (including detailed descriptions as part of accessible supplementary online85
material); (2) We showcase the potential for using this behaviorome to create ageing-relevant COAs for fall risk, frailty,86
late-life depression, and MCI; (3) We highlight the possibility of discovering novel digital biomarkers on the basis of87
the introduced COAs.88
2 Results89
2.1 An Unobtrusive Digital Behaviorome90
We introduce a set of 94 hypothesis-driven base measures, from which we further derive a total of 1268 digital measures91
using aggregation and frequency analysis. All measures are obtainable through unobtrusive and privacy-preserving92
contactless sensors that do not require any participant interaction. Of these 1268 digital measures, 223 were extracted93
by means of PIR sensors in essential rooms (the entrance, bathroom, living room, bedroom, and kitchen) and magnetic94
door sensors on the refrigerator and entrance door. An additional 1046 measures were extracted on the basis of sleep95
data from a quasi-piezoelectric bed sensor placed under the mattress. Detailed descriptions and derivations, as well96
as associated hypotheses, are provided in the supplementary material, together with a high-level summary table1 of97
all presented digital measures. Furthermore, an extensive online version with interactive visualisations, along with98
additional data including measure distributions and correlations with various ageing-relevant health indicators and99
outcomes, is available online at GitHub 2 and serves as an online supplementary to this article. An example of averaged100
behavioromes is shown in Figure 1.101
2.2 Machine Learning based Digital Clinical Outcome Assessments102
Here, we demonstrate how the introduced digital behaviorome could be useful for for ageing and ageing related research.103
To this end, we created machine learning-derived digital clinical outcome assessments, aimed at automatically classifying104
ageing-relevant health outcomes based on the behaviorome. We created five datasets, one based on each clinical105
1https://narayanschuetz.github.io/digital-behaviorome/SummaryTable.xlsx
2https://narayanschuetz.github.io/digital-behaviorome
3
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Figure 1: Depicts an example of z-normalised, averaged behavioromes of participants with mild cognitive impairment
(MCI) (based on a Montreal Cognitive Assessment screening 0 (in blue) indicate
above-average values for that group, while < 0 (red) indicates below-average values. Many digital measures visually
differ in both examples. It should be noted that this is a down-scaled visualisation, as not all measures would fit in the
figure. For the complete and interactive version, see the supplementary online version.
4
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Table 1: Results for the creation of machine learning-derived digital COAs based on clinical assessments for fall risk
(TUG & POMA), frailty (EFS), late-life depression (GDS), and mild cognitive impairment (MoCA).
TUG: Timed Up and Go Test
POMA: Performance-Oriented Mobility Assessment
EFS: Edmonton Frail Scale
MoCA: Montreal Cognitive Assessment
ROC AUC (± 95 CI) PrAUC (± 95 CI)
Dataset Demographics Behaviorome Behaviorome + Demographics Behaviorome Behaviorome +
Demographics Demographics
TUG 0.662 ± 0.041 0.786 ± 0.037 0.783 ± 0.036 0.681 ± 0.035 0.816 ± 0.033 0.805 ± 0.034
POMA 0.777 ± 0.028 0.782 ± 0.035 0.805 ± 0.027 0.615 ± 0.046 0.650 ± 0.047 0.678 ± 0.044
EFS 0.564 ± 0.034 0.704 ± 0.039 0.698 ± 0.038 0.523 ± 0.041 0.625 ± 0.045 0.603 ± 0.044
GDS 0.602 ± 0.046 0.620 ± 0.048 0.616 ± 0.048 0.397 ± 0.051 0.477 ± 0.054 0.458 ± 0.053
MoCA 0.430 ± 0.038 0.780 ± 0.039 0.757 ± 0.038 0.653 ± 0.027 0.863 ± 0.028 0.839 ± 0.028
assessment, including fall risk, frailty, late-life depression, and MCI. This analysis is based on remote-monitoring data106
from two observational longitudinal pilot studies in Switzerland, where independently living, community-dwelling older107
adults were equipped with pervasive computing systems and monitored over the course of a year, while simultaneously108
being subject to regular visits and clinical assessments. The results on predicting ageing-relevant positive and negative109
health outcomes are summarised in Table 1. The differences between using the behaviorome alone versus using the110
behaviorome in addition to demographics were minimal and, judging by overlapping 95% CIs, non-significant. The111
highest discriminative power, in terms of ROC AUC (area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve), was112
achieved with the Tinetti Performance-Oriented Mobility Assessment (POMA)-based fall-risk dataset when including113
both demographic and behaviorome information (ROC AUC = 0.805). Notably, however, demographic information114
alone was sufficient to produce good performance (ROC AUC = 0.777) in this particular case. Performances on the115
fall-risk related Timed Up and Go Test (TUG), the MCI-related Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), and the116
frailty-related Edmonton Frail Scale (EFS) datasets were also relatively high, with ROC AUC values of 0.786, 0.780,117
and 0.704, respectively, when using only the behaviorome. The worst performance was achieved with the dataset based118
on the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) (ROC AUC = 0.620), when using only the behaviorome. Here, the difference119
between using only demographics versus using the behaviorome was also minimal, with a slight but non-significant120
advantage in favour of the behaviorome-only scenario. Overall, though, the addition of the behaviorome resulted, in all121
cases, in higher ROC AUC and PrAUC (Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve) values than those obtained when using122
only demographic information. These differences were statistically significant in all but the POMA and GDS datasets123
(which were based on rather conservative, non-overlapping CI intervals). The largest differences were found with the124
MoCA and TUG datasets, for which the objectives were to identify participants with an indication of mild cognitive125
impairment or increased fall risk, respectively.126
2.3 Evaluation of Individual Digital Measure Importance127
The importance of individual digital measures with respect to the COAs were evaluated by means of SHapley Additive128
exPlanations (SHAP) values [33, 34]. In Figure 2, we present the most important digital measure, based on global129
SHAP values, across all 100 simulations of each single dataset – corresponding to the different COAs. A more detailed130
table, highlighting the top 10 highest-ranked measures based on global SHAP values, is available in the Appendix C.III.131
Furthermore, in Figure 3, we display beeswarm plots of SHAP values for the individual COAs. These show how the132
nine most important digital measures – as well as the sum of all other measures combined – influence the log odds ratio133
of having a negative health outcome on the various datasets. Values shown in Figure 3 mostly align with the global134
SHAP importance rankings, although there are minor differences. Since the global SHAP rankings are based on 100135
iterations (and thus 100 models), and since the importances shown in Figure 3 are based on a single model, we generally136
place greater emphasis on the global SHAP values. Nonetheless, the beeswarm plots are still useful, as they provide137
insights into the direction of effects.138
3 Discussion139
In this work, we introduce a digital behaviorome based on unobtrusive and privacy-preserving contactless sensor140
technology that is uniquely suitable for use in the population of community-dwelling older adults. We then demonstrate141
5
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Figure 2: Displays descriptions and density plots of the most important digital measure for each outcome. Across all
density plots, blue indicates a positive/neutral outcome, while orange indicates a negative outcome.
6
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Figure 3: Shows beeswarm plots of the 9 most important digital measures based on SHAP values on all outcome
datasets: TUG (Timed Up and Go) & POMA (Performance Oriented Mobility Assessment = fall risk, GDS (Geriatric
Depression Scale) = late-life depression, EFS (Edmonton Frail Scale) = frailty, MoCA (Montreal Cognitive Assessment)
= mild cognitive impairment. Finally, the contributions of the sum of the remaining measures is displayed. Digital
measures are ordered according to their importance, from top to bottom. The x-axis represents log odds, where values
above zero indicate relevance for a negative outcome. Colouring further shows the direction of this association, where
blue indicates lower values of a given measure and red indicates higher respective measure values. Detailed explanations
of the individual measure names are given in the supplementary material or on the supplementary website. Note that
these plots are based on models trained on the whole respective dataset and are therefore slightly different from the
global importances shown in Table C.III, which are based on 100 simulation iterations.
7
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the feasibility of utilising the introduced behaviorome to create machine learning-based digital COAs for common142
ageing-relevant outcomes, including fall risk, frailty, late-life depression, and mild cognitive impairment. Finally, we143
determine which individual digital measures were most relevant for a given COA.144
145
While the idea of a sensor-derived behaviorome as a non-exhaustive set of digital measures characterising a person’s146
behaviour is not entirely new, existing work remains scarce and is not primarily focused on technologies that can be147
reliably used in the population of community-dwelling older adults. The existing research often concerns the use of148
wearable devices over brief pre-defined time intervals, which may not be optimal for long-term monitoring (ranging149
from several years to potentially decades) with older adults; this technology contrasts somewhat with the type of150
sensor systems that have been successfully used for this purpose. Thus, our introduced digital behaviorome is not only151
the most detailed (to our knowledge) to date but also derivable by a set of simple, privacy-preserving, and low-cost152
contactless sensors. Consequently, it is compatible with technologies used in a majority of long-term remote-monitoring153
projects involving older adults, including the recently established Collaborative Aging Research Using Technology154
(CART) initiative, which seeks to make ageing-related digital health approaches more accessible to the broader research155
community [23]. Overall, then, we believe that the presented digital behaviorome has the potential to serve as a baseline156
set of measures that may be calculated over long time frames (ranging from years to potentially decades), but which157
could also be supplemented (potentially over shorter time periods) with digital measures based on more specific sensors,158
such as pillbox door sensors, wearables, or smartphones, depending on the specific needs, circumstances, and conditions.159
160
Our results indicate that a digital behaviorome derived from simple and unobtrusive sensors could be suitable for161
creating useful ageing-relevant digital COAs. This is reflected by the good discriminative performances across all162
COAs except for late-life depression, resulting in ROC AUC values of ≥ 0.7. Notably, these results are based on a163
very limited sample size, which makes it highly probable that this is a conservatively low estimate of what could be164
possible. In all cases, results based on the behaviorome led to higher ROC AUC and PrAUC values than those obtained165
from only using demographics information such as (see Table 1). These differences were significant in three (TUG,166
EFS, and MoCA) out of the five outcome datasets, indicating that the behaviorome captures information beyond just167
simple demographics. It is also notable that adding demographic information to the behaviorome did not result in168
significantly better performance across outcomes, which may indicate that this type of information is already implicitly169
present in the behaviorome. While we used COAs here as an example for feasibility purposes, COAs could be very170
useful for continuously assessing an older adult’s health status with respect to specific outcomes and may allow for the171
implementation of early preventive interventions. For instance, if an older adult exhibits increased fall risk, it may be172
reasonable for them to see a fall prevention specialist. Furthermore, COAs such as those shown could aid research into173
complex ageing-relevant conditions such as cognitive impairment by providing objective information on how such174
impairment impacts a person’s daily life.175
176
Putting these results into perspective, passive sensor-based fall-risk assessments were shown to yield AUC values in the177
range of 0.65–0.89 [35]. It should be noted that these values were obtained using wearables by means of accelerometry178
and predominantly with very few digital measures of gait (and sometimes with accelerometer signal characteristics).179
Furthermore, none of the studies mentioned in this paper used long-term data, and some were performed under180
laboratory conditions far removed from real life. Our behaviorome-only results, with ROC AUC values of 0.786181
(TUG dataset) and 0.805 (POMA dataset), are thus in line and satisfactory by comparison. Meanwhile, in terms of182
important digital measures, it is notable that not only physical activity and broadly gait-related measures (such as the183
number of room transitions) but also sleep and rhythmicity measures, such as activity in bed, bed-exit count, or activity184
fragmentation, were of major importance in discriminating between participants with high and low fall risk (see Figure185
3). Although prospective data would be necessary to form clear conclusions, this may suggest that behavioural data186
beyond just gait and physical activity may be relevant for fall-risk assessments in older adults. Moreover, results from187
Piau et al. show that PIR array-based gait speed may help identify future fallers [21]. In this regard, the inclusion of188
gait-speed information that is more accurate yet still unobtrusive into a behaviorome would likely further increase189
performance on fall-risk assessments.190
191
In terms of frailty, comparable studies report ROC AUC values between 0.72 and 0.86, based on wearable sensors192
[36, 37, 38]. These results were primarily obtained on the basis of gait and physical activity measures. Additionally,193
frailty definitions, study type, and participant characteristics differ quite significantly, so at best this gives a broad194
idea of what is possible. With a behaviorome-only ROC AUC value of 0.704, our results are on the lower end of this195
spectrum. However, given the types of sensors on which our behaviorome is based, this seems realistic. Indeed, some196
of the most important measures related to frailty were related to fridge usage, physical activity (room-transition counts),197
8
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and sleep duration (see Figure 3), all of which seem plausible as indicators.198
199
For late-life depression, comparable studies are lacking. Several studies have demonstrated the utility of using200
wearable-based digital measures in assessing general depression [ 39, 40, 41]. Furthermore, one instance reported201
on the assessment of late-life depression using PIR-derived information on activities of daily living (ADL) [ 42].202
However, it is unclear whether their methodology prevented data leakage, judging by the unusually high ROC AUC203
values ≥ 0.95. Our own results, by contrast, show modest performance in assessing late-life depression, with a204
behaviorome-only ROC AUC value of 0.620. While this may be due to the low number of participants with a GDS205
score above 5 in our cohorts, it could also indicate some inherent difficulties in measuring this outcome. Many of the206
most important individual measures for late-life depression assessments are related to sleep duration (see Figure 3),207
which is known to be associated with depression. More interestingly, variations in fridge usage and behaviour complex-208
ity were relevant; however, due to their relatively low discriminative power, further interpretation may not be meaningful.209
210
Regarding the distinction between healthy older adults and those with MCI, recent work has shown ROC AUC values211
of 0.62–0.80, based on comparable time intervals [ 43, 32]. These values were achieved with wearable devices but212
also when using additional modalities such as smartphone and computerised assessments. Our behaviorome-only213
result, with a ROC AUC value of 0.780, is thus aligned with similar research and shows that good discriminative214
performance may potentially be achieved through an entirely passive and unobtrusive set of sensors. Further supporting215
the plausibility of our results, a respectable body of literature shows how individual digital measures based on PIR and216
door sensors – such as variability in PIR array-based gait speed [44, 45, 20], ADL regularity [13], regularity in physical217
activity [18], sleep disturbances [46], and outing duration [47] – differed between older adults with MCI and healthy218
controls. Finally, with regards to MCI, highly important measures include those related to physical activity, such as the219
number of room-transitions or the total amount of PIR-based activity. Moreover, sleep-related measures such as sleep220
duration, activity in bed, and variation in in-bed activity were found to be important (see Figure 3). Regarding MCI,221
however, the most noteworthy finding is the inclusion of various sleep-related heart-rate measures – most importantly,222
the variation in nightly heart-rate dipping behaviour, where unusually high variation seems indicative of MCI (see223
Figure 2). This is especially interesting, as it has not been previously reported in connection with digital measures.224
However, it is known that heart-rate dipping is associated with cardiovascular disease [48] and that cardiovascular risk225
factors may be involved in cognitive decline [49]. As such, it could be beneficial to further investigate the relationship226
between nightly heart rate and mild cognitive impairment.227
228
The presented behaviorome is a novel, thoroughly documented, and extensive set of digital measures obtainable with229
unobtrusive contactless sensor technologies. Sensor technologies appear to be the most successful in real-world230
use in ageing-related long-term remote-monitoring projects [ 14]. With growing interest in digital health solutions231
and remote monitoring, a digital behaviorome may be critical to the future of technology-assisted ageing and may232
provide value in both healthcare and research settings. As one potential use case, we demonstrate the feasibility of233
using the introduced behaviorome to create ageing-relevant COAs with real-world data from naturalistic samples of234
older adults. Our results often align with comparable results obtained from more obtrusive (but potentially more235
accurate) wearable sensors. Finally, we have found multiple individually interesting digital measures that may merit236
further investigation. These measures show how a behaviorome may also be of potential use in discovering novel237
ageing-relevant digital biomarkers. Another notable observation is that, across all outcomes, the sum of the remaining238
SHAP values – that is, all digital measures except for the 9 most important ones combined – was highly important239
in explaining model outcomes (see Figure 3). This supports the intuition that an extensive set of digital measures,240
such as the introduced behaviorome, is likely beneficial in terms of COA performance, as opposed to individual or241
several digital measures. It should also be mentioned that, by relying entirely on privacy-preserving, unobtrusive,242
and contactless technologies, large sets of digital measures may be derived without ethical concerns related to243
burdening subjects with unnecessary sensing modalities. The best practices laid out by Goldsack et at., for instance,244
discourage efforts towards sensor-symptoms mapping, which is to some degree what a digital behaviorome-based245
approach is doing [3]. However, since in this case sensor technologies respect privacy and do not add any additional246
burden, there are scarcely any downsides, as would occur with adding additional wearables or tasks requiring interaction.247
248
Future research should emphasise further analytical and clinical validation of the included digital measures. Moreover,249
analysing long-term temporal dynamics would be essential, as it would enable the identification of trajectories of certain250
digital measures or even whole groups of measures. Evaluating trajectories, in turn, could be extremely valuable, as251
was shown by Akl et al., for instance, who produced impressive results regarding MCI classification based on long-term252
trajectories of several individual digital measures [20]. In addition, future research could combine a digital behaviorome253
such as the one we utilised with traditional multi-omics data in a deep phenotyping effort. This may enable a wide254
9
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range of new research insights into ageing and ageing-related conditions, as it adds a new layer of objective information255
for characterising phenotypes of health and disease. As a final caveat, a digital behaviorome such as this should256
never be assumed to be complete or fixed. Future research will add new digital measures while old measures may be257
merged if they exhibit closely correlated behaviour. As such, in the immediate future, it may be of major value to add258
more accurate gait-related digital measures to the introduced behaviorome, as these have consistently been shown259
to be very important across many ageing-relevant health outcomes. Consequently, they are likely to add significant value.260
261
There are four major limitations to this work. First, some of the introduced measures have not been validated beyond262
the scope of this research (the use or validation of a digital measure in other studies is indicated in the supplementary263
material). This implies that some digital measures may not quantify what we hypothesise, which could lead to inaccurate264
interpretations and conclusions. Second, our feasibility demonstration involved a relatively small number of participants.265
Therefore, these results should be interpreted with caution, although general tendencies are likely to be valid. Third,266
in the feasibility demonstration, we use a cross-sectional approach that fails to leverage the temporal trajectories of267
sequentially collected behaviorome slices. Indeed, we strongly believe that data collected over multiple years would be268
necessary to fully explore the utility of behaviorome-based approaches. Finally, one drawback of simple PIR sensors269
is that not all digital measures based on this technology can be calculated when more than one person is living in an270
apartment. This is not a problem for the sleep sensor, and certain PIR sensor-derived measures may be valid nonetheless,271
but it does warrant consideration.272
4 Conclusion273
In this work, we introduce an unobtrusive digital behaviorome for use in the older adult demographic. Overall, the274
behaviorome consists of 1268 digital measures derived from 94 hypothesis-driven base measures. All included digital275
measures are derived from a small set of privacy-preserving contactless sensors that have been successfully used276
in multiple ageing-related, long-term, remote-monitoring projects around the world. For each measure, we provide277
a detailed description, background information, and additional real-world data as supplementary online material.278
While use cases for the introduced behaviorome are diverse, we demonstrate a potential use case by creating multiple279
machine learning-derived digital COAs and evaluating their discriminative performance. To this end, we show how280
ageing-relevant outcomes such as fall risk, frailty, and mild cognitive impairment could be assessed through an extensive281
set of unobtrusively obtained digital measures. Our results with these measures not only show that information from282
the behaviorome significantly outperformed basic demographic information, but also that behaviorome-based COAs283
could match the performance reported in comparable studies employing more obtrusive wearable sensors, which may284
not be optimal for long-term monitoring among older adults. Finally, we highlight the possibility of using a digital285
behaviorome to potentially discover novel digital biomarkers, using a model explainability approach on the basis of286
models used to create the aforementioned COAs. The respective results show that the most important digital measures287
are reasonable, while also revealing two potentially relevant insights. First, while fall risk may be primarily associated288
with gait and physical activity, it also potentially exhibits strong associations with sleep-related measures. Second,289
unusually high variation in nocturnal heart-rate dipping was uniquely related to mild cognitive impairment.290
5 Methods291
5.1 Minimally-Obtrusive Digital Behaviorome292
5.1.1 Sensors293
The introduced digital measures are based on three sensor types that have been commonly used in remote-monitoring294
projects with older adults: PIR sensors, contact door sensors, and a sleep sensor. The PIR motion sensors were placed295
in the essential rooms of older adults’ apartments. Essential rooms included the living room, bedroom, entrance,296
bathroom/toilet, and kitchen. The employed PIR sensors sampled with 0.5 Hz, and thus reported activity on or off states297
every 2 seconds. The reed switch-based door sensors, meanwhile, were placed at the entrance and the refrigerator door.298
Both PIR and door sensors were part of the DomoCare® (DomoSafety SA, Lausanne, Switzerland) home-monitoring299
system. Finally, for the sleep sensor, we used an EMFIT QS ferroelectret sensor (Emfit Ltd, Vaajakoski, Finland),300
which was fixed beneath the mattress at approximately chest height. A summary of these three devices, as well as their301
respective source data streams, is given in Table 2.302
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Table 2: A summary of the contactless pervasive computing devices used, including the respective data streams they
provide.
Sensor Device Location Device Type Data Stream Sampling Rate Channels
PIR Motion DomoCare Wall/ Ceiling Contactless Activity 0.5 Hz Entrance
Toilet
Bedroom
Livingroom
Kitchen
Others
Magnetic Door
Reed Switches DomoCare Door Contactless Open/ Close State Events Entrance
Fridge
Bed Sensor EMFIT QS Beneath Mattress Contactless Heart Rate 0.25 Hz N/A
Respiration Rate 0.25 Hz N/A
Activity 0.25 Hz N/A
Toss & Turns Events N/A
Sleep Phases 0.25 Hz Awake
REM
Deep
Light
Raw Low
Frequency Band 50 Hz N/A
Raw High
Frequency Band 100 Hz N/A
Bed Exits Events N/A
Summary Statistics Daily N/A
5.1.2 Creation of Digital Measures303
The creation of the digital measures was mostly hypothesis-driven or based on measures from the existing literature.304
The majority of measures were calculated on a daily or nightly basis (for instance, daily total activity, daily outing305
duration, or average heart rate during a night). Subsequently, we calculated derivates of those measures by means of306
descriptive statistics over non-overlapping bi-weekly segments.While bi-weekly segments may be somewhat arbitrary,307
two weeks is a sufficient period to capture variation in behaviour that often follows daily or weekly cycles while still308
being short enough to capture temporally limited behaviours. Additionally, it serves to increase the number of data309
points (data augmentation) and facilitates the process of working with sensor recordings of various lengths or with data310
gaps. For cases of certain behavioural or rhythmicity measures, such as Cosinor regression-based measures, raw data311
from the whole bi-weekly segment was used directly. To avoid the inclusion of measures with insufficient data, we set a312
minimum number of 10 days for which raw source data was available throughout a given bi-weekly segment; otherwise,313
the measure was set as missing. The criteria for including a day’s worth of data for each sensor type are explained in314
detail in the supplementary material 1.315
For all daily or sub-daily base measures, derivates based on summary statistics were calculated over the bi-weekly316
segments. Summary statistics include various quantiles, denoted as q n (e.g. q10), the interquartile range (iqr), the317
mean, median (=q50), coefficient of variation (coefvar), and robust measures of kurtosis and skewness (kr3 and sk3,318
respectively), following the naming convention proposed by Kim and White [50]. Figure 4 summarises this workflow319
visually. Eventually, this left 1268 dimensional vectors (one per bi-weekly segment). Of those, 223 dimensions are320
related to PIR and door sensors, while the remaining 1045 are based on sleep-sensor data. Detailed information321
regarding the exact calculation of each measure, as well as individual distributions across our cohort, can be found at322
online.323
5.1.3 Example Visualisation324
We provide an example of averaged behavioromes with respect to MCI. These visualisations were created by first325
averaging the behavioromes on a per-participant basis, followed by z-normalisation. After that, the behavioromes were326
split into the positive and negative outcome groups and averaged once more. Finally, heatmaps for both conditions327
were created. As a result, the values of individual digital measures > 0 indicate above-average values, while those < 0328
indicate below-average values.329
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Figure 4: Shows a broad summary of how digital measures were calculated, starting with raw sensor data from PIR
sensors, door sensors, and bed sensors. Raw data streams were first segmented into non-overlapping bi-weekly segments.
Then, for each bi-weekly segment, digital measures were calculated. If, for a given measure, less than 10 days of data
were present, the measure was encoded as missing, which eventually left 1268 dimensional vectors – one per bi-weekly
segment.
Table 3: Participant Characteristics
Characteristic Cohort 1 (n=24) Cohort 2 (n=21) Pooled (n=45) Differences (p-value)
Age (years) 88±7 86±7 87±7 0.50
Sex female (%) 79 52 67 0.06
TUG 14.0±10.0 15.3±4.8 14.5±8.2 0.58
POMA 21.4±7.4 24.1±3.3 22.5±6.1 0.13
EFS 4.6±3.6 5.0±1.7 4.7±2.9 0.65
GDS 2.3±2.3 4.2±3.2 3.1±2.9 0.04
MoCA 20.5±5.1 20.6±3.7 20.5±4.7 0.95
5.2 Machine Learning based Digital Outcome Assessments330
5.2.1 Participants331
To test the feasibility of using the previously described behaviorome to create ageing-relevant COAs, we used real-332
world remote-monitoring data from two cohorts of older Swiss adults (pooled age years=87 ±7; sex 67% [30/45]333
female). The original studies were both pilots designed to assess novel computing technologies for ageing-in-place334
scenarios in the German- and French-speaking cantons of Switzerland [51, 52]. They were conducted between 2017335
and 2018 and monitored participants over one year with a set of pervasive computing devices and clinical assessments336
[51, 52]. The inclusion criteria between cohorts were similar in the sense that both aimed to recruit a natural sample337
of community-dwelling older adults (aged ≥ 70 years) who lived alone and without pets. On the other hand, the338
exclusion criteria between cohorts differed. For cohort 1, the only exclusion criterion was an unwillingness to comply339
with the study protocol. But, for cohort 2, the exclusion criteria were as follows: (1) severe cognitive impairment340
rendering the individual unable to follow study protocol (clock-drawing score≥ 4); (2) skin problems such as irritations,341
itching, or serious redness; (3) undergoing dialysis; (4) unwillingness to comply with the study protocol; (5) an inability342
to understand the study aim; or (6) hospitalisation planned within a short period of time [ 51]. Both studies were343
conducted based on principles declared in the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Ethics Committees of the344
cantons of Bern and Vaud (KEK-ID: 2016-00406 and CER-VD ID: 2016-00762, respectively). All subjects signed345
and returned informed consent forms before participating in the study. Detailed participant characteristics and cohort346
differences are shown in the Appendix 3. The differences between cohorts were statistically examined on the basis347
of unpaired, two-sided, two-sample t-tests ( α = 0.05 ). In every analysis involving participant data, all participants348
with any available data (depending on sensor data and the availability of clinical assessments) were included; this also349
applies to participants that dropped out of the studies.350
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Table 4: Overview of clinical assessments used to evaluate the health status of study participants, including the
measurement interval and cut-off points used to divide participants into groups with positive/neutral or negative health
outcomes.
Assessment Assessment Interval Cut-Off Points Outcome
Cohort 1 Cohort 2
TUG 6 weeks 6 weeks ≥ 12 seconds [58] Fall-Risk
POMA half year half year 5 points [60] Frailty
GDS begin/end begin/end ≥ 5 points [61] Depression
MoCA begin/end end < 23 points [62] MCI
Table 5: Dataset Characteristics
Dataset Participants Total Participants with Negative Outcome Number Bi-Weekly Segments
TUG 28 14 277
POMA 28 10 277
EFS 28 10 277
GDS 28 7 277
MoCA 25 16 260
5.3 Clinical Assessments351
Participants in both cohorts were subject to an overlapping set of standardised clinical assessments. These include the352
following six assessments: (1) the Timed Up and Go Test (TUG), which is often used in geriatrics to assess fall risk353
[53]; (2) the Tinneti Performance-Oriented Mobility Assessment (POMA), which, as with the TUG, also measures354
balance and gait characteristics that are often indicators for elevated fall risk among older adults [54]; (3) the Edmonton355
Frail Scale (EFS), a frequently used measure of frailty among older adults [55]; (4) the short version (15-item) of the356
Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), a commonly used late-life depression screening tool [56]; (5) the Montreal Cognitive357
Assessment (MoCA), which measures cognitive function and is often used as a brief screening tool for the detection358
of MCI in older adults [57]. In each cohort, these assessments were planned to be conducted at least once during the359
one-year study duration. Detailed assessment intervals are summarised in Table 4.360
5.4 Dataset Creation361
To evaluate the potential for creating COAs that may help differentiate between positive and negative ageing-relevant362
health outcomes based on the proposed behaviorome, we categorise participants into one of the two categories for each363
clinical assessment. This was done on the basis of validated cut-offs for each assessment in 5.3. The respective cut-off364
values for the negative groups are shown in Table 4. Next, we calculated the digital measures as presented in 5.1.2365
for all participants. For each assessment, we then combined the positive/negative labels with the bi-weekly segments366
of a given participant. If multiple records of the same clinical assessments were obtained throughout the study, we367
assigned the target label corresponding to the assessment closest in time. After this procedure, we obtained one dataset368
per assessment.369
Note that measures derived from PIR and door sensors stem from one sensor system (meaning that technical failure370
usually affect both sensor types, except for instances were an individual sensor unit failed, which happened rarely),371
while sleep stems from another sensor; thus, for a bi-weekly segment to be valid, at least 30% of measures from both372
sensor systems must be valid. This led to a significant reduction in the number of bi-weekly segments, as a large373
number of sleep sensor data were missing due to technical issues, as has been discussed in prior work [16]. These two374
issues — lacking sensor data from both PIR/door and bed sensors and the unavailability of respective assessments375
— are responsible for the generally lower numbers of participants who could be included in this analysis (the exact376
numbers with regards to each assessment are given in Table 5). In Figure 5, we present the high-level flowchart of377
dataset creation.378
5.5 Machine Learning Analysis379
A small forenote aimed at a more technically oriented audience: what we call digital measures throughout this work can380
be seen as synonymous to the more abstract and general term "features". To evaluate COAs based on the behaviorome,381
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Figure 5: Highlights the workflow of creating datasets, subsequently used for the creation of digital clinical outcome
assessments. First, digital measures were separately calculated for the PIR + door and bed sensors and segmented into
non-overlapping, bi-weekly segments. After that, the measures from bi-weekly segments, where the percentage of
missing digital measures from either sensor system was < 30%, were combined. Next, the clinical assessments from
each participant were matched with the respective bi-weekly digital measure vectors to combine 5 datasets — one for
each assessment.
we largely followed the approach set out by Chen et al., albeit with some minor changes [ 32]. As such, we use the382
gradient boosting-based XGBoost algorithm [63] as a classifier, since it generally performs impressively on tabular data,383
tends to deal reasonably well with high-dimensional feature spaces (even in p >> n -type scenarios, as here), and can384
inherently deal with missing values, all of which means it is close to being the gold standard for this kind of application385
[32, 64, 39]. Furthermore, gradient boosting-based tree approaches tend to be more easily explainable than modern386
neural network approaches such as convolutional neural networks, while also retaining high accuracy, especially on387
tabular data structures [34]. To better account for stochasticity in participant selection, we further adapted the simulation388
strategy of Chen et al. [32], in which 70% of participants were repeatedly drawn from the entire participant pool to389
form a training set, while the remaining 30% were used as a test set (the splits are stratified for the respective clinical390
assessment labels). This procedure was repeated for 100 iterations. Note, that this way each new draw represents a391
shuffling of the dataset without introducing data leakage between training and test splits. Throughout each iteration,392
hyperparameters were first optimised within the training split by means of stratified 3-fold cross-validation coupled with393
random search (consisting of 50 search trials). For more detailed explanation of this strategy, we refer to the original394
article by Chen et al., where it is demonstrated in detail [ 32]. Eventually, for each iteration, we calculated the Area395
Under the Receiver-Operating Curve (ROC AUC) and the Area Under the Precision Recall Curve (PrAUC) on the test396
set, where multiple bi-weekly segments from a single participant were combined into one score by averaging their397
predictions (soft voting), as was done in [32]. Likewise, if multiple assessment results were available, they were first398
averaged, which should have also reduced some of the inherent noise; these results were then dichotomised on the basis399
of the previously introduced cut-off points (see Table 4) to yield a single label per participant. We removed three digital400
measures (Measure IDs: iqr_entrance_door_tod_first, q50_entrance_door_tod_first, and q50_fridge_door_tod_middle)401
from the full set for this portion of the analysis, as they were biased towards identifying one of the two cohorts (to402
account for further less-obvious biases in this regard, we included cohort information in the demographics). Note403
that the PrAUC is sensitive to label distribution, which means it only lends itself to comparisons within the same404
dataset. For each assessment, we ran three different scenarios, one with only demographic information (age, sex, and405
cohort membership) as baseline, one with only the behaviorome, and one with both the behaviorome and demographic406
information combined. Differences between these scenarios were deemed statistically significant if the 95% CIs of407
two conditions do not overlap. Model hyperparameter ranges were given in the supplementary material. We used the408
original Python (version 3.6) implementation of XGBoost (version 1.3.3). Model training was performed on UBELIX409
(http://www.id.unibe.ch/hpc), the HPC cluster at the University of Bern.410
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5.6 Identifying Digital Measures of Interest411
To better understand the role of individual digital measures in machine learning-based COAs, we used SHapley Additive412
exPlanations (SHAP), a game-theoretic approach for explaining complex machine learning models. With this approach,413
exact solutions can be found in the case of tree-based models [33, 34]. SHAP values have been used fairly extensively414
in recent biomedical applications [65, 32, 66, 67]. For each of the assessments, we provide overall global SHAP values415
across all 100 simulations. That is, we give the mean absolute value of the SHAP values for a given digital measure m416
in a single simulation, summed up over all simulations417
SHAP global
m =
100X
i=1
mean(|SHAP i
m|).
While global SHAP values reveal the overall importance of a given digital measure, they do not say anything about the418
direction in which the digital measure influences a model. Therefore, we additionally calculate beeswarm plots of the419
SHAP values. These are based on a model trained over the entire respective dataset, with manually set hyperparameters420
(reported in the supplementary material). SHAP values were calculated using Python (version 3.6) with the shap421
package (version 0.39.0).422
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