DALLAS –
Alexandra Boukhvalova, a medical student at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, and her collaborators developed an interactive smartphone app to assess some aspects of cognitive and motor function for patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Their findings were reported during a poster session at the meeting held by the American Society for Prevention and Treatment in Multiple Sclerosis.
“The clinician assessment is an hour-long assessment; it requires a trained neurologist,” Ms. Boukhvalova pointed out. In thinking about how app-based assessment could augment the clinical exam, she and her collaborators realized that “a lot of the neurologic exam is still quite subjective – so is there a way that we can make that exam more objective and quantifiable and also add a little bit of ease with accessibility and mobility?
“We created a suite of test apps ... to assess different neurological systems, ranging from motor function, cognitive and visual dysfunction, general fatigue, and strength,” she said. The apps included tapping tests and balloon-popping tasks, along with measures to give some indication of spasticity by assessing the smoothness of movements.
Participants completed the testing both in the clinic and from home. “We did not need an investigator present for patients to be able to complete the tests,” said Ms. Boukhvalova.
Ms. Boukhvalova and her colleagues compared performance on the gamified tasks between patients with MS and healthy controls. For all tasks, the participants with MS could clearly be differentiated from the healthy participants.
A further plus was that “The patients almost viewed these tests as games.” They reported that they enjoyed completing them, said Ms. Boukhvalova, adding that app-based assessments also offer an additional point of connection between MS patients and specialists, whom they may only see annually or semiannually.
Further app development may focus on utilizing sensor and accelerometer functions in smartphones to perform more natural and sophisticated motor analysis to look at gait and gross motor functioning, she said.