RESUMO
BACKGROUND: By enabling frequent, sensitive, and economic remote assessment, smartphones will facilitate the detection of early cognitive decline at scale. Previous studies have sustained participant engagement with remote cognitive assessment over a week; extending this to a period of 1 month clearly provides a greater opportunity for measurement. However, as study durations are increased, the need to understand how participant burden and scientific value might be optimally balanced also increases. OBJECTIVE: This study explored the little but often approach to assessment employed by the Mezurio app when prompting participants to interact every day for over a month. Specifically, this study aimed to understand whether this extended duration of remote study is feasible, and which factors promote sustained participant engagement over such periods. METHODS: A total of 35 adults (aged 40-59 years) with no diagnosis of cognitive impairment were prompted to interact with the Mezurio smartphone app platform for up to 36 days, completing short, daily episodic memory tasks in addition to optional executive function and language tests. A subset (n=20) of participants completed semistructured interviews focused on their experience of using the app. RESULTS: Participants complied with 80% of the daily learning tasks scheduled for subsequent tests of episodic memory, with 88% of participants still actively engaged by the final task. A thematic analysis of the participants' experiences highlighted schedule flexibility, a clear user interface, and performance feedback as important considerations for engagement with remote digital assessment. CONCLUSIONS: Despite the extended study duration, participants demonstrated high compliance with the schedule of daily learning tasks and were extremely positive about their experiences. Long durations of remote digital interaction are therefore definitely feasible but only when careful attention is paid to the design of the users' experience.
Assuntos
Demência , Aplicativos Móveis , Adulto , Cognição , Estudos de Viabilidade , Humanos , Pessoa de Meia-Idade , SmartphoneRESUMO
Introduction: Gallery Game, deployed within the Mezurio smartphone app, targets the processes of episodic memory hypothesized to be first vulnerable to neurofibrillary tau-related degeneration in Alzheimer's Disease, prioritizing both perirhinal and entorhinal cortex/hippocampal demands.Methods: Thirty-five healthy adults (aged 40-59 years), biased toward those at elevated familial risk of dementia, completed daily Gallery Game tasks for a month. Assessments consisted of cross-modal paired-associate learning, with subsequent tests of recognition and free recall following delays ranging from one to 13 days.Results: Retention intervals of at least three days were needed to evidence significant forgetting at both recognition and paired-associate recall test. The association between Gallery Game outcomes and established in-clinic memory assessments were small but numerically in the anticipated direction. In addition, there was preliminary support for utilizing the perirhinal-dependent pattern of semantic false alarms during object recognition as a marker of early impairment.Conclusions: These results support the need for tests of longer-term memory to sensitively record behavioral differences in adults with no diagnosis of cognitive impairment. Aggregate behavioral outcomes promote Gallery Game's utility as a digital assessment of episodic memory, aligning with established theoretical models of object memory and showing small yet uniform associations with existing in-clinic tests. Initial support for the discriminatory value of perirhinal-targeted outcomes justifies ongoing large-sample validation against traditional biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease.
Assuntos
Doença de Alzheimer/psicologia , Memória/fisiologia , Smartphone , Adulto , Disfunção Cognitiva/psicologia , Feminino , Humanos , Masculino , Pessoa de Meia-Idade , Testes Neuropsicológicos , SemânticaRESUMO
Dementia is the most widespread form of neurodegenerative disorder and is associated with an immense societal and personal cost. Prevalence of this disorder is projected to triple worldwide by 2050 leading to an urgent need to make advances in the efficiency of both its care and therapy research. Digital technologies are a rapidly advancing field that provide a previously unavailable opportunity to alleviate challenges faced by clinicians and researchers working in this area. This clinical review aimed to summarise currently available evidence on digital technologies that can be used to monitor cognition. We identified a range of pervasive digital systems, such as smartphones, smartwatches and smart homes, to assess and assist elderly demented, prodromal and preclinical populations. Generally, the studies reported good level of agreement between the digital measures and the constructs they aimed to measure. However, most of the systems are still only in the initial stages of development with limited data on acceptability in patients. Although it is clear that the use of digital technology to monitor and support the cognitive domains affected by dementia is a promising area of development, additional research validating the efficacy, utility and cost-effectiveness of these systems in patient populations is needed.