Cognitive assessment of stroke patients with mobile apps: a controlled study

Stroke is a major cause of cognitive impairments. New technologies such as virtual reality and mobile apps have opened up new possibilities of neuropsychological assessment and intervention. This paper reports a controlled study assessing cognitive functioning through a mobile virtual reality application. Fifteen stroke patients recruited from a rehabilitation hospital and 15 healthy control subjects underwent neuropsychological evaluation with traditional paper-and-pencil tests as well as with a pilot version of the Systemic Lisbon Battery (SLB). The criterion validity was the performance of stroke patients vs. healthy controls - which was lower both on the neuropsychological tests and on the SLB for patients. The pattern of correlations between neuropsychological tests and the SLB sub-tests for the respective dimensions showed overall moderate correlations in the predicted directions. We conclude that the SLB applications were able to discriminate the dimensions that they were designed to assess.