Self-Administered Neuropsychological Assessment Battery

The recent military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to increased incidence of cognitive symptoms associated with traumatic brain injury (TBI), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), alcohol and substance abuse, mood and anxiety disorders, and chronic pain. Neurocognitive impairment negatively affects the functional performance and daily life of service members so that consistent assessment is necessary at many levels. Unfortunately, existing neurocognitive assessment tests that are sensitive to cognitive dysfunction of various origins are often time-consuming and require trained personnel to administer properly. Creare proposes to develop, test, validate, and commercialize a mobile, self administered neurocognitive assessment battery (SANAB) that probes the core neurocognitive domains including verbal learning and memory, visual memory, (sustained) attention, executive function, processing speed, and language. State-of-the-art speech recognition algorithms allow for verbal responses by the user for self-assessment and navigation. As a result, patients with motor skill impairment will be able to self-administer the test battery more easily. During the first phase of this SBIR project, Creare has demonstrated the feasibility of our proposed SANAB with a verbal memory task that uses speech recognition to interpret the response of the user with sufficient accuracy to enable likely identification of cognitive impairment.