Contribution of a Tablet-Based Tests to the Diagnosis of Neurocognitive Disorders in Older Adults: A Feasibility Study.

Neurocognitive diseases are diagnosed in specialized centers such as memory clinics, where the waiting time can be long. The reference assessment involves a battery of tests carried out by a specialized team. Facilitating screening in primary care using new technologies could make it possible to appropriately direct care pathways towards specialist care. This work aimed to set up a battery of questionnaires, cognitive and manual dexterity tests on a digital tablet to screen people with cognitive impairment. Three groups of people are recruited from a memory consultation: people with major neurocognitive disorders, people with mild neurocognitive disorders and people with no cognitive impairment. Initial results in geriatric settings show that the digital tablet assessment test is feasible and well accepted, but that manual dexterity assessment needs to be adapted to the bodily particularities of the very old.

A Digital Clock Drawing Test on Tablet for the Diagnosis of Neurocognitive Disorders in Older Adults.

The diagnosis of neurocognitive diseases is an important health issue for patients, families and healthcare professionals. The need to develop rapid, high-performance screening tools would improve access to care. The Clock Drawing Test (CDT) is widely used and validated with the older adults, and its digital version is becoming increasingly widespread. We propose to confirm its validity in a population of old patients hospitalized in a geriatric unit, and secondly to verify its performance in comparison with the reference diagnosis made by a specialized team in a memory consultation. CDTs were collected from older hospitalized patients, both in paper form and digitally on a touchscreen tablet. The results show good agreement between the paper and digital versions (kappa coefficient = 0.81). Sensitivity and specificity of the digital CDT were 0.84 and 0.59 respectively for the diagnosis of major cognitive disorders. The corresponding values were 0.72 and 0.59 for the diagnosis of mild neurocognitive disorders. User questionnaires indicate that older participants find the digital tablet easy to use. However, they prefer to use paper, even if they are open to learning how to use the tablet.