Project Coordinator: Mirna Wetters Portuguez, PhD

Members: Sabine Possa Marroni, MSc (PhD Project in progress), Paulo Bertram Garcia, Ingrid Louise and Karen Wolfart Chies.

With the advancement of technology, resources with applications are a practical, simple and easy to use option by healthcare professionals and serve as instruments for assessing and storing patient data. Test your Brain is a mobile application specifically for iPad devices, which uses the Objective-c language. The results and patient data obtained by the test remain under the domain of the device user and can be compared with the patient's follow-up. All of its content is available to be accessed offline, so it is possible to make better use of graphic and interface resources.

The Test your Brain app aims to verify whether the elderly is at risk for developing some type of degenerative brain disease, or even to verify that their complaints of difficulties are not indicative of cognitive impairment , but a normal decline in age. The application makes it possible to obtain information through a screening test, which can be used by any health professional who is assisting the elderly. There is no application on the market that proposes to test brain functioning in this context. The tests are easy to understand, are done in sequence and resemble computer games. Tasks that assess different brain functions have been created and adapted for this purpose.

The application consists of tests that evaluate different brain functions: financial management, facial memory, viso-spatial perception, viso-spatial construction, visual memory, auditory memory, auditory recognition, language, temporal orientation, visuospatial orientation and attention. There is a database, where the user will register some information and the final result will be stored. The period of 6 months is indicated to repeat the test to assess the patient's evolution. The final result of the tests will be given in the form of a traffic light: red to indicate immediate specialized search, yellow should be careful and accompanied and green as an indication that cognitive functions are preserved. The application is being validated in normal groups of elderly people, to provide reliable scores according to the age group.

Check out the Facebook Brain Test page.