Using Finger Dexterity in Elderly and Younger People to Detect Cognitive Decline

Abstract

Because the number of elderly people is rapidly growing, using information and communication technology (ICT) for services to watch single-elder-person households has been attracting attention. Most of these services are aimed at detecting elders’ abnormalities. They could become more effective, from the preventive-medicine point of view, if additional functions were added to watch for any decline in the elders’ cognitive functions. In this paper, we describe a method for detecting minor declines in elders’ cognitive functions, which they may not be aware of, by measuring and analyzing their spiral-tracing ability using a tablet device. We developed such a measurement/analysis system and applied it to three groups of test participants: young, non-frail elders, and frail elders. This paper first describes the method for analyzing the numbers of out-of-orbit tracing attempts, the numbers of uncompleted attempts, the required time, and the angular velocities, and then refers to these tasks to reveal the elders’ characteristics from the analytic results.