Passive digital health technologies for Alzheimer’s disease screening and diagnosis: a systematic review

Passive digital health technologies (DHTs) are increasingly promoted as scalable tools for detecting Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) earlier than routine clinic visits. We searched six major databases for English-language studies published between January 2014 and July 2024 that used passively collected, real-world DHT data for ADRD screening or diagnosis. Thirty studies met the criteria. Population sizes were highly skewed (median = 87; range 12-82,829), and most designs were longitudinal (53%) and fully passive (68%). Wrist-worn accelerometers and photoplethysmography sensors dominated, though several studies also used gait, sleep, voice, radar, or posture-tracking devices. A cross-study synthesis showed that those two modalities were primarily applied to memory, attention, and language tasks. Nineteen studies reported median accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and precision between 80-90%, with F1-score and AUC medians approaching 78%, though relying on in-sample cross-validation rather than external cohorts. Reference standards varied widely, data-quality criteria were seldom reported, and fewer than 5% shared datasets publicly. Classification was the predominant modeling strategy, with regression emerging only in recent years. Overall, passive DHTs show promise as low-burden triage tools for population-level ADRD screening, but routine deployment will require more diverse cohorts, harmonized reporting, multimodal privacy-preserving analytics, and rigorous human-factors evaluation.