Mobile health screening platform for degenerative neurological disorders

Abstract

The new and dynamic field of mHealth - the use of mobile technology applications for healthcare - could improve the well-being of people around the world. Mobile applications can lower costs and improve the quality of healthcare as well as shift behavior to strengthen prevention, all of which can improve health outcomes over the long term. Technologies of mHealth field are a valuable partner in health care's shift towards a delivery model that is patient-centered and value-based. A broad category of brain diseases is Dementia, which causes long term loss of the ability to think and reason clearly that is severe enough to affect a person's daily functioning. The most common form of Dementia is Alzheimer's disease (75%). Although Alzheimer's disease develops differently for every individual, there are many common symptoms. Early symptoms are often mistakenly thought to be 'age-related' concerns, or manifestations of stress. Neurology cognitive tests used for symptoms recognition to such degenerative disorders are generally applied by paper-and-pencil until now. These kinds of tests implemented until now on PCs have typically unfriendly interface and do not take people's capabilities into consideration. Our aim was to develop a mHealth screening platform that combines various neurological tests that will help the diagnosis of early dementia and Alzheimer disease by easy performed self-testing applications, provided by a friendly GUI. The application is composed of the best 3 tests chosen from the paper-and-pencil standard tests, Clock drawing test (CDT), Mini Cog test (MCT) and Montreal Cognitive Assessment test (MoCA). This thesis is important for being one of the first mobile applications for degenerative neurological disorders self-testing that is compatible for tablets and smart-phones regardless witch operating system is running