VREAD: A Virtual Simulation to Investigate Cognitive Function in the Elderly

Author

Shamsuddin, Syadiah Nor Wan ; Ugail, Hassan ; Lesk, Valerie ; Walters, Elizabeth

Author_Institution

Fac. of Inf., Univ. of Sultan ZainalAbidin, Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia

fYear

2012

fDate

25-27 Sept. 2012

Firstpage

215

Lastpage

220

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) may convert to Alzheimer´s disease (AD) over time although not all MCI cases progress to dementia. The diagnosis of MCI is important to allow prompt treatment and disease management before the neurons degenerate to a stage beyond repair. Hence, the ability to obtain a method of identifying MCI is of great importance. VREAD is a quick, easy and friendly tool that was developed with an aim to investigate cognitive functioning in a group of healthy elderly and those with MCI. It focuses on the task of following a route, since Topographical Disorientation (TD) is common in AD. The results shows that this novel simulation was able to predict with about 90% overall accuracy using weighting function proposed to discriminate between MCI and healthy elderly.

Keywords

cognition; diseases; medical computing; medical disorders; neurophysiology; patient diagnosis; patient treatment; virtual reality; AD; Alzheimer´s disease; MCI diagnosis; TD; VREAD; cognitive function; dementia; disease management; healthy elderly group; mild cognitive impairment; neurons; topographical disorientation; virtual simulation; weighting function; Accuracy; Dementia; Games; Senior citizens; Virtual environments; Dementia; Diagnosis; Virtual Simulation;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Cyberworlds (CW), 2012 International Conference on

Conference_Location

Darmstadt

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-2736-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CW.2012.37

Filename

6337422