Significant Features of Hand Motion for Dementia Evaluation in the Simple Recreation Game

摘要

Increasing the number of dementia patients is one of the big social problems in Japan. Early detection and prevention of dementia are essential. Medical specialists and care workers usually use some dementia evaluation methods. However, some elderly persons often become very nervous about the evaluation tests. Also, these evaluation tests should be conducted continually to assess a patient’s cognitive function. On the other hand, recently, research papers on the relationship between simple human actions and a patient’s cognitive function have been reported. The authors focused on hand dexterity and movement of both hands because these factors have some relationships to cognitive functions. We developed a new recreational system to evaluate hand dexterity and activity of both hands to assess a subject’s cognitive functions. Also, the authors discussed the relationship between the extracted features and a subject’s cognitive functions. As a result of experiments, we determined the feature descriptor(s) about hand motion to estimate and evaluate a patient’s cognitive function.