Towards Decision Support with Assessment of Neuropsychological Profiles in Alzheimer's Dementia Using Playful Tablet-Based Multimodal Activation

In dementia care there is a lack of knowledge in the context of interventions considering the evolvement of individual cognitive impairments over the course of time. Dementia principally affects distinctive neuroanatomic networks associated with complex cognitive domains, i.e., the neuropsychological profile. The PLAYTIME app - a suite of serious games - was played on a Tablet-PC combining two approaches. One component represented a serious game with integrated eye movement analysis. This functionality is outlined in the MIRA (Mobile Instrumental Review of Attention) framework, a toolbox of attention-based games. The toolbox is used to evaluate executive functions, such as, the inhibitory functionality of controlled eye movements. Another component is represented by the multimodal activation (MMA) app with various cognitively challenging gamified exercises. Both MIRA and MMA showed different profiles of correlation between their play scores and several MoCA (Montreal Cognitive Assessment) sub-scores. The score captured from MIRA as well as from MMA enables to estimate Alzheimer’s mental state and establish neuropsychological profiles to identify individual cognitive deficits.