Cognitive testing in people at increased risk of dementia using a smartphone app: The ivitality proof-of-principle study

Abstract

Background: Smartphone-assisted technologies potentially provide the opportunity for large-scale, long-term, repeated monitoring of cognitive functioning at home. Objective: The aim of this proof-of-principle study was to evaluate the feasibility and validity of performing cognitive tests in people at increased risk of dementia using smartphone-based technology during a 6 months follow-up period. Methods: We used the smartphone-based app iVitality to evaluate five cognitive tests based on conventional neuropsychological tests (Memory-Word, Trail Making, Stroop, Reaction Time, and Letter-N-Back) in healthy adults. Feasibility was tested by studying adherence of all participants to perform smartphone-based cognitive tests. Validity was studied by assessing the correlation between conventional neuropsychological tests and smartphone-based cognitive tests and by studying the effect of repeated testing. Results: We included 151 participants (mean age in years=57.3, standard deviation=5.3). Mean adherence to assigned smartphone tests during 6 months was 60% (SD 24.7). There was moderate correlation between the firstly made smartphone-based test and the conventional test for the Stroop test and the Trail Making test with Spearman ρ=.3-.5 (P