54 PROFILING COMMUNICATION ABILITY IN PEOPLE WITH DEMENTIA: DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW INSTRUMENT TO INFORM MANAGEMENT OF COGNITIVE COMMUNICATION DIFFICULTIES
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Communication difficulty is an integral part of dementia, a major age-related syndrome, leading to limitations in functioning and social isolation. Although much can be done to maximize communication abilities, no instrument focuses on the communication abilities of people with dementia that is sensitive to change across time and linked with specific strategies to support communication. Profiling Communication Ability in Dementia (P-CAD) was devised in 2015 and shows promise in clinical practice. The aim is to validate the P-CAD to direct individualised advice, support and therapy for people with dementia and their carers. It will detect changes in communication and will be a robust outcome measure to evaluate efficacy of current and new communication interventions in dementia. Method There are two phases to this study. Phase 1 involved revising and amending the earlier version of the P-CAD based on feedback from carers, people with dementia, medical and nursing staff, health and social care professionals as well as speech and language therapists (SLTs). Nine SLTs used the P-CAD in clinical practice over a 6-week period. Results Phase 1 is complete. Feedback was obtained through questionnaires and focus groups. Overall, the response was positive. Participants suggested some amendments to face, content and ecological validity. Changes were made to the scoring system; an additional accessible profile summary form was also included. The new instrument comprises 8 sections, which includes cognitive, linguistic and functional communication parameters. It objectively evaluates cognitive communication abilities and provides support strategies. Conclusion The P-CAD has been extensively revised following feedback with the final P-CAD ready for validation. The focus remains on the abilities of people with dementia and carers across different stages of the condition. Phase 2 involves validation of the final P-CAD with 100 people with dementia and carers across Ireland and Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".