Dementia Detection Game Design

Abstract

Dementia describes a wide range of symptoms associated with a decline in memory and other thinking skills severe enough to reduce a person's ability to perform everyday activities. A standard dementia testing is often done by testing the cognitive functions in a neuropsychological test which generally takes between two to five hours. Therefore, healthy people or someone who is not aware of his symptoms are not likely to take the test, declining the chance of early detection of dementia. Subsequently, a mobile device based dementia detection game has been implemented in this project to achieve continuous monitoring on user's health condition and dementia severity. This game is targeted at healthy elderly adults, dementia suspects and early-stage patients. Cognitive functions which are most often impaired by the disease, such as memory, attention, motor ability and problem solving, are tested in the game. Each level of the game contains four random mini-games, each of which carries out testing on one cognitive function. These mini games are designed with a prototype of corresponding formal neuropsychological test and therefore the effectiveness can be guaranteed. Multiple levels, dynamic difficult adjustment, random game contents and other tuning skills are applied to enable the continuous assessment of game players. In addition to evaluating individual test scores, the within-person distribution of test scores is also analyzed as a function of dementia severity. An interface for external database are also prepared for dementia detection use. Connecting to database with adequate clinical samples and health adults information can undoubtedly increase the accuracy of the test. The detection methods and their accuracy have been further discussed in this project.