The Utility of Mobile Visuomotor Assessment for Neuropsychological Evaluation in Older Adults

Performance in complex visuomotor tasks, where guiding visual information doesn't align spatially with the required motor output, relies on the brain's ability to integrate somatosensory information for an appropriate motor response. Performance on such "cognitive-motor integration" tasks is affected in Alzheimer’s disease. We investigate the relationship between a traditional neuropsychological test battery and a tablet-based visuomotor skill performance tasks. Older adults ranging from healthy to early Alzheimer’s disease completed the neuropsychological test battery, three tablet-based tasks and a series of tasks on the KINARM. We observed that 5 of our 6 CMI outcome measures were predictive of four tests from the WMS-IV battery, once variability for sex and age were accounted for; with one outcome variable significantly correlated between the two technologies. Our findings suggest that our multi-domain remotely deployable mobile task (BrDI) may be a good first step assessment tool in order to flag at-risk individuals.