VR tool can detect pre-dementia with almost 90% accuracy: Study

It requires users to do daily tasks in virtual environments of everyday places such as flat

- Zhaki Abdullah

The immersive environments enabled by virtual reality (VR) have made the technology great for gaming and training.

Now, a locally developed VR application can be used to identify which seniors have mild cognitive impairment, or pre-dementia, with almost 90 per cent accuracy.

This is according to a study of the technology's effectiveness in primary care settings by SingHealth Polyclinics.

The tool, known as Cognitive Assessment by Virtual Reality (Cavire-2), is designed to assess six cognitive functions - memory, attention, language, perceptual-motor function, social cognition, and executive function - through 13 interactive scenarios involving daily living tasks.

Set in virtual environments of everyday places such as a Housing Board flat and a supermarket, it requires users to put on a VR headset and perform daily tasks such as calculating the price of fruits and choosing banknotes of various denominations to pay for groceries, all while a baby is crying in the background, to assess their ability to focus.

In the assessment of social cognition - referring to the mental processes involved in how people perceive and respond to people and situations around them - users are tested on their responses to situations such as witnessing a birthday party or a traffic accident.

Starting in 2020, primary care researchers from SingHealth Polyclinics worked with local VR software firm FXMedia to develop Cavire-2.

The study found that Cavire-2 is able to reliably distinguish between cognitively healthy individuals and those with mild cognitive impairment, with 88.9 per cent accuracy.