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Improving Responsiveness in Game-based Cognitive Assessment for Mild Cognitive Impairment
Medrxiv : the Preprint Server for Health Sciences
|August 8, 2025
Summary
Game-based cognitive monitoring shows promise for detecting cognitive decline in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). This approach offers a valid, accessible alternative to traditional screening tools for aging populations.
Area of Science:
- Gerontology
- Neuroscience
- Computational Psychiatry
Background:
- Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) affects a significant portion of older adults, often preceding dementia.
- Current cognitive screening tools, like the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), face limitations in accessibility and ecological validity due to reliance on clinicians and test anxiety.
- Game-based cognitive monitoring is an emerging field with potential for sensitive, self-administered cognitive assessment.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce and evaluate an analytic pipeline for screening cognitive decline in individuals with MCI using a serious gaming platform.
- To assess the sensitivity of game-based cognitive metrics to cognitive changes over time in an MCI population.
- To explore the correlation between game-based cognitive assessments and established clinical measures.
Main Methods:
- Development of an analytic pipeline utilizing the Neuro-World serious gaming platform with six adaptive subgames.
- 12-week monitoring of ten participants with MCI, involving 24 game sessions.
- Analysis of gameplay data (accuracy, response time) using correlation-based feature selection and machine learning models.
Main Results:
- Strong correlations were observed between game-based cognitive assessments and clinician-administered MoCA scores (r = 0.71).
- Game-based metrics demonstrated significant correlation with longitudinal cognitive changes (r = 0.80).
- The analytic pipeline successfully estimated cognitive function and tracked changes over the study period.
Conclusions:
- Game-based cognitive assessments offer a promising, self-administered, and ecologically valid method for screening cognitive decline in MCI.
- This technology supports early detection of cognitive changes in aging populations, potentially aiding in dementia prevention strategies.
- The developed analytic pipeline demonstrates the feasibility of using serious games for sensitive and continuous cognitive monitoring.
