Acceptance of Unsupervised App-Based Cognitive Assessment in Outpatient Care: An Implementation Study

Area of Science:

• Digital health
• Cognitive science
• Geriatric medicine

Background:

• Unsupervised digital cognitive assessments offer opportunities for early Alzheimer disease detection.
• These tools can minimize resource demands in medical practices.
• Healthcare acceptance of these novel assessment methods remains largely unevaluated.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the acceptance of an app-based, repeated cognitive assessment for early Alzheimer disease symptoms.
• Assessments were conducted in an outpatient setting from both physician and patient viewpoints.

Main Methods:

• 15 primary care practices implemented an app for weekly home-based cognitive testing over 12 weeks.
• Patients with reported memory issues used the neotivCare app for episodic memory assessment.
• Physicians and patients completed questionnaires post-assessment to gauge acceptance.

Main Results:

• Physician feedback indicated the app supported diagnostic decision-making (58%) and increased certainty (84%).
• Most patients felt thoroughly tested (76%) with minimal burden from the time commitment (16%).
• A majority of patients (72%) completed all weekly tests over the 12-week period.

Conclusions:

• Physician and patient acceptance of unsupervised digital cognitive assessments is high.
• These findings suggest significant potential for integrating such tools into routine healthcare.
• Future large-scale studies should focus on healthcare delivery impact and patient outcomes.