The Future of Cognitive Screening: At-Home Digital Tools for Older Adults

Published on July 1, 2022

Imagine if you could assess your cognitive abilities from the comfort of your own home! A team of researchers has developed a groundbreaking digital tool called the Remote Characterization Module (RCM). This tool allows older adults to take a 25-minute cognitive screener that measures memory, attention, verbal fluency, and set-shifting. By comparing the performance of participants who took the traditional paper-and-pencil version in person versus the RCM version at home, the researchers found that there were minimal differences in how they performed on most tasks. This means that digital testing can be just as reliable as in-person testing for assessing cognitive performance in older adults. Imagine the possibilities this opens up! Older adults can now easily and conveniently participate in cognitive assessments, regardless of their location or mobility. This breakthrough has huge implications for the future of cognitive screening, making it more accessible and inclusive for a larger population. To learn more about this exciting research, check out the full article.

Standardized neuropsychological assessments of older adults are important for both clinical diagnosis and biobehavioral research. Over decades, in-person testing has been the basis for population normative values that rank cognitive performance by demographic status. Most recently, digital tools have enabled remote data collection for cognitive measures, which offers the significant promise to extend the basis for normative values to be more inclusive of a larger cross section of the older population. We developed a Remote Characterization Module (RCM), using a speech-to-text interface, as a novel digital tool to administer an at-home, 25-min cognitive screener that mimics eight standardized neuropsychological measures. Forty cognitively healthy participants were recruited from a longitudinal aging research cohort, and they performed the same measures of memory, attention, verbal fluency and set-shifting in both in-clinic paper-and-pencil (PAP) and at-home RCM versions. The results showed small differences, if any, for how participants performed on in-person and remote versions in five of eight tasks. Critically, robust correlations between their PAP and RCM scores across participants support the finding that remote, digital testing can provide a reliable assessment tool for rapid and remote screening of healthy older adults’ cognitive performance in several key domains. The implications for digital cognitive screeners are discussed.

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