An AR User Interface for the Evaluation of Visuospatial Abilities

Abstract

Early pathogen processes of Alzheimers dementia (AD) develop years before the time of diagnosis. The process starts in hippocampal regions, which play an important role in spatial cognitive abilities including spatial memory. The decrease of these abilities leads to deficits in orientation and navigation and has a high impact on everyday live. A simple, fast and exact evaluation of the spatial memory impairment could help to detect the disease at an early stage (e.g. during a regular screening) and could thus enable stopping or slowing down the process. This work aims at the development of such a screening tool by combining a version of the established Smith-Milner paradigm (SMP) [26, 27] for analysis of spatial-cognitive deficits with the technical possibilities of the augmented-reality (AR) technology. A new AR-application was developed and the user acceptance was evaluated with a first group of healthy subjects (N = 40). The user interface of the AR application was specifically tailored for easy use by older participants and non-technical physicians.