DrawDem

A Digital Drawing Platform for Dementia Screening

Dementia is a global health problem affecting millions of elderly. The existing pharmacological treatment only showed short-term benefits to improve cognitive function among dementia patients. We studied the effectiveness of combination therapy, but the long term treatment efficacy is still questionable.

Previous literature showed early diagnosis of cognitive impairment is important to recognize early stage of dementia before the patients progressing to the late stage. Patients will be able to plan for the future, arrange suitable residential care in advance, and monitor the disease development themselves. Families can also be supported at a much earlier stage and minimize the crises as far as possible.

Screening tests are quick and useful tools to assess the cognitive condition of patients, but the traditional screening tools are in form of paper-and-pencil tests, and the screening procedures are heavily relied on healthcare professionals.

DRAWDEM is a digital platform that enables clinical researches to seamlessly collect drawing data of subjects from different cohorts for automatic dementia screening. The goal of proposing this APP is to broadcast drawing analysis of the elderly for early detection of dementia.

The initial release of DRAWDEM includes Pentagon-Copying Test, which is a drawing task presented in one of the most commonly used cognitive tests - Mini-Mental State Examination (M-MSE).