MobileCogniTracker

Abstract

As the population ages, cognitive decline is becoming a worldwide threat to older adults' independence and quality of life.Cognitive decline involves problems with memory, language, thinking and judgement, thus severely compromising multiple aspects of people's everyday life. Diagnosis of cognitive disorders is currently performed through clinical questionnairebased assessments, which are typically conducted by medical experts once symptoms appear. Digital technologies can help providing more immediate, pervasive and seamless assessment, which could, in turn, allow for much earlier diagnosis of cognitive disorders and decline. In this work, we present MobileCogniTracker, a digital tool for facilitating momentary, seamless and ubiquitous clinically-validated cognitive measurements. The proposed tool develops digital cognitive tests in the form of multimedia experience sampling questionnaires, which can run on a smartphone and can be scheduled and assessed remotely. The tool further integrates the digital cognitive experience sampling with passive smartphone sensor data streams that may be used to study the interplay of cognition and physical, social and emotional behaviours. The Mini-Mental State Examination test, a clinical questionnaire extensively used to measure cognitive disorders, has been particularly implemented here to showcase the possibilities offered by our tool. A usability test showed the tool to be usable for performing digital cognitive examinations, and that cognitively unimpaired persons in the relevant age-group are capable of performing such digital examination. A qualitative expert-driven validation also shows a high inter-reliability between the digital and pencil-and-paper version of the test.

Smartphone-Based Platform for Affect Monitoring through Flexibly Managed Experience Sampling Methods

“…The questionnaire asks for the input of the self-perceived value of both affect dimensions. Its usefulness beyond traditional paper-based questionnaires for real-time assessment has been successfully explored in recent works [33]. Currently, the ESM questionnaire of this work includes two questions to measure the affect dimensions following the circumplex model: valence and arousal.…”

“…In order to join the study, the participants simply need to scan the QR code using the AWARE client app, and all the settings are automatically downloaded and configured. Regarding the ESM configuration, we have developed a new AWARE Flexible ESM plugin [44] based on the structure proposed in [33]. This plugin, along with some changes made to the AWARE Client source code, enables the construction of the ESM questionnaires with customized response styles, using the previously generated XML configuration files.…”

Methodological Quality of User-Centered Usability Evaluation of Ambient Assisted Living Solutions: A Systematic Literature Review

“…In terms of publication types, ten studies were published in conference proceedings [31,32,34,35,38,40,42,61,62,72] and 34 studies were published in scientific journals [33,36,37,39,41,[43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71]73,74].…”

Human Behaviour Analysis through Smartphones

“…Additionally, screen touch patterns can be employed to detect quality metrics, sleeping duration and whether the subject uses the phone during night-time, leading to the monitoring of long-term cognitive states in many mental disorders, such as schizophrenia and depression [42]. A recent work has explored the use of so-called cognitive experience sampling methods, which go beyond traditional clinical questionnaires while introducing a myriad of tasks that users can perform on the phone, ubiquitously and opportunistically, in order to measure the cognitive functioning of the user [50].…”