‘Kitchen and cooking’, a serious game for Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease: a pilot study

Recently there has been a growing interest in employing serious games for the assessment and rehabilitation of elderly people with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related disorders. In the present study we examined the acceptability of ‘Kitchen and cooking’ - a serious game developed in the context of the EU project VERVE (http://www.verveconsortium.eu/) - in these populations. In this game a cooking plot is employed to assess and stimulate executive functions (such as planning abilities) and praxis. The game is installed on a tablet, to be flexibly employed at home and in nursing homes. 21 elderly participants (9 MCI and 12 AD, including 14 outpatients and 7 patients living in nursing homes, as well as 11 apathetic and 10 non-apathetic) took part in a 1-month trail, including a clinical and neuropsychological assessment, and 4-week training where the participants were free to play as long as they wanted on a personal tablet. During the training, participants met once a week with a clinician in order to fill in self-report questionnaires assessing their overall game experience (including acceptability, motivation, and perceived emotions). The results of the self reports and of the data concerning game performance (e.g. time spent playing, number of errors, etc) confirm the overall acceptability of Kitchen and cooking for both patients with MCI and patients with AD and related disorders, and the utility to employ it for training purposes. Interestingly, the results confirm that the game is adapted also to apathetic patients

Ecological assessment of autonomy in instrumental activities of daily living in dementia patients by the means of an automatic video monitoring system

International audienceCurrently, the assessment of autonomy and functional ability involves clinical rating scales. However, scales are often limited in their ability to provide objective and sensitive information. By contrast, information and communication technologies may overcome these limitations by capturing more fully the functional as well as cognitive disturbances associated with Alzheimer disease (AD). We investigated the quantitative assessment of the autonomy of dementia patients based not only on gait analysis but also on the participant performance on instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) automatically recognized by a video event monitoring system (EMS). Three groups of participants (healthycontrols, mild cognitive impairment, and AD patients) had to carry out a standardized scenario consisting of physical tasks (single and dual task) and several IADL such as preparing a pillbox or making a phone call while being recorded. After, video sensor data were processed by an EMS that automatically extracts kinematic parameters of the participants’ gait and recognizes their carried out activities. These parameters were then used for the assessment of the participants’ performance levels, here referred as autonomy. Autonomy assessment were approached as classification task using artificial intelligence methods that takes as input the parameters extracted by the EMS, here referred as behavioral data. Activities were accurately recognized by the EMS with high precision. The most accurately recognized activities were “prepare medication” with 93% and “using phone” with 89% precision. The diagnostic group classifier obtained a precision of 73.46% when combining the analyses of physical tasks with IADL. In a further analysis, the created autonomy group classifier which obtained a precision of83.67% when combining physical tasks and IADL. Results suggest that it is possible to quantitatively assess IADL functioning supported by an EMS and that even based on the extracted data the groups could be classified with highly accuracy. This means that the use of such technologies may provide clinicians with diagnostic relevant information to improve autonomy assessment in real time decreasing observer biases