A Study of Game-Based Cognitive Assessment APP for Dementia Screening

Abstract

Due to the prevalence of dementia as increasing with age the dementia screening becomes an important issue in aging or aged society Compared to general elders the groups of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is shown to have higher ratio about 10-15% being changed into dementia annually From the aspect of healthcare cost about NT$20 000 in average is spent for a mild dementia patient per month The cost is increasing with disease severity and puts heavy burden on their family If the patients can be diagnosed and treated earlier not only disease progression can be slowed down but also the quality of life may be maintained In addition it may save more labors and cost on caregiving There are several cognitive assessments for clinical application such as Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) Cognitive Abilities Screening Instrument (CASI) Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) etc however according to statistics the clinical OPD following-up rate of dementia patients is still low Nowadays smart phones and tablet are easily available and become a part of daily life Therefore in this study Game-Based Cognitive Assessment (GBCA) is proposed and developed for early screening of cognitive impairment GBCA is a type of an interactive game APP implemented on Android and Windows platforms It includes the user background information acquisition and 13 test games in 5 main cognitive domains (visuospatial perception attention language memory and executive functioning) The testing contents are designed by taking the general assessments in clinic as reference The game theme and elements are based on Taiwanese culture so it would go with daily life experience In this study 103 valid data (NC=50 MCI=14 Dementia=39) have been collected including scores of CDR CASI MMSE the proposed GBCA and a questionnaire The results show the highly linear correlation between GBCA and CASI (r=0 93) as well as between the APP and MMSE (r=0 91) From the results of GBCA the average score for the groups of NC MCI and dementia are 90 2 76 5 and 47 3 respectively Based on the comparison analysis the proposed APP is demonstrated to be a potential tool for dementia screening

Date of Award	2018 Sept 3
Original language	English
Supervisor	Kuo-Sheng Cheng (Supervisor)