A Novel Multi-Modal Sensor Dataset and Benchmark to Detect Agitation in People Living with Dementia in a Residential Care Setting

People living with dementia (PwD) in residential care settings often exhibit responsive behaviors, with agitation being the most common behavior. Automated systems to detect agitation events have the potential to improve patient care by helping to track symptoms and their response to interventions. We conducted a study from 2017 to 2019 in which we collected a novel multi-modal sensor dataset from 20 PwD living in a dementia care unit. Each participant wore an Empatica E4 watch for a maximum period of up to 60 days, leading to a large dataset worth 600 days. This wearable device collects raw acceleration, blood volume pulse, electro-dermal activity, and skin temperature data. The data are annotated with the start and end times of agitation events. Our previous analyses have shown that agitation behavior can be detected with a high area under receiver operating characteristic curve. We are now releasing this novel dataset for the research community to advance research in the field. In this article, we describe the study details, protocol used for annotation, improved agitation labelling, signal processing steps, and feature extraction approach. We present a new baseline on this dataset that can fuel new research in this important area of research.