Investigation and Validation of Digital Trail Making

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Biomedical Engineering

Background:

• Accurate diagnostics are crucial for individualized neurological impairment interventions.
• Current cognitive-motor assessments offer limited performance metrics.
• Digitizing clinical tools can reveal detailed behavioral characteristics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To validate a novel digital variant of the Trail Making Test (dTMT).
• To assess the dTMT's ability to extract advanced metrics.
• To establish the dTMT's utility for future clinical research.

Main Methods:

• Healthy participants completed both traditional paper TMT (pTMT) and the novel dTMT.
• Criterion validity was assessed by correlating completion times between pTMT and dTMT.
• Advanced metrics like dwell time and path length were extracted from the dTMT.

Main Results:

• Significant positive correlations were found between pTMT and dTMT completion times.
• The dTMT successfully captured effects of test complexity on completion time, dwell time, and path length.
• Validation confirmed the dTMT's reliability in measuring cognitive-motor function.

Conclusions:

• The novel digital Trail Making Test (dTMT) is a valid tool for assessing cognitive-motor function.
• The dTMT provides advanced metrics potentially offering deeper insights into neurological deficits.
• This validated dTMT serves as a foundation for research in pathological populations.