Development of cognitive function evaluation contents for mobile based on MMSE-DS

Abstract

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is considered as the intermediate stage between the cognitive changes of normal aging and dementia, which is marked by decline in memory but preserved ability to perform activities of daily living compared with that of healthy individuals of the same age. These patients need to delay the progression to dementia through early diagnosis and use the standardized Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) as an assessment tool. This study realized the content into a convenient mobile application for assessment of cognitive abilities based on MMSE for Dementia Screening (MMSE-DS) modified as a Korean version, and verified the consistency of a modified version compared to MMSE-DS and user satisfaction. Most content items consist of multiple-choice questions with four answer choices to allow convenient assess to the content via mobile devices. Since it is challenging to identically express questionnaire items assessing patient’s active performance as a content, items are represented as following: First, in an item on folding a given paper in half in response to examiner’s command, a subject is asked to draw a line on a yellow rectangle at the location where paper can be folded in half. Second, in an item on exact copying of two intersecting pentagon figures, a subject is asked to find a pentagon figure same as the pentagon shape in the given example. As a result, the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) was 0.938, showing a significantly high correlation.