On-Device Transformer Architectures for Speech Evaluation in Neurodegenerative Disease Detection

Speech alterations are early markers of neurodegenerative diseases. Transformer-based speech models such as Whisper have advanced automated speech assessment, but most systems rely on cloud-based computation, raising privacy concerns. On-device processing could offer a scalable and privacy-preserving alternative. This research’s objective was to evaluate whether a fully on-device speech analysis pipeline can achieve competitive accuracy in detecting Alzheimer’s disease and to quantify the contributions of acoustic, linguistic, and embedding features. Therefore, we developed an iOS application running all components, including acoustic analysis, two transformer-based speech-to-text modules (WhisperBase and quantized CrisperWhisper), linguistic feature extraction, and embedding generation, directly on the device. Using the ADReSS Challenge 2020 dataset (N = 156), we trained classical machine-learning classifiers across 20 configurations and evaluated them via a stratified 10-fold cross-validation. Area under the receiver operating curve (AUC), accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores were used as performance metrics. An ablation study examined the relevance of each feature group. The best-performing setup (Random Forest with CrisperWhisper transcription and Apple embeddings) achieved an accuracy of 85.4% and an AUC of 0.85. Performance was 5–7% below benchmark models relying on manual transcripts or server-based processing. Embedding features provided the strongest individual contribution, but the highest accuracy required combining acoustic, linguistic, and embedding information. A fully on-device pipeline for Alzheimer’s disease detection from speech is feasible and achieves competitive accuracy while maintaining strict data privacy. These findings highlight the potential of on-device transformer architectures for scalable, privacy-preserving digital screening. Future work should validate the approach in larger and more diverse cohorts.