The Real-World Usability, Feasibility, and Performance Distributions of Deploying a Digital Toolbox of Computerized Assessments to Remotely Evaluate Brain Health: Development and Usability Study (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND One of today’s global challenges is managing brain health and understanding how performance changes across the lifespan. OBJECTIVE We developed and deployed a set of self-administrable, computerized assessments designed to measure key indices of brain health across the visual and auditory sensory modalities. METHODS Potential participants were untrained users who self-registered on an existing cognitive training app called BrainHQ. Participants were contacted via a recruitment email and registered remotely to complete a demographics questionnaire and 29 unique assessments on their personal device. We examined assessment properties and the association between self-reported demographic variables and quantitative performance. RESULTS Of the 365,782 potential participants contacted via a recruitment email, 414 registered, and 104 completed all 29 assessments. Registered participants were an average of 64 years old (range: 13-107), majority female (65%), educated (80% with a degree), and with ethnic backgrounds similar to those reported by the 2022 U.S. Census (78% white, 17% minority). Most assessments were normally distributed (55%) without ceiling or floor effects (55%), sensitive to age (72%), agnostic to gender- and education-based differences (76% and 93%, respectively), and brief with a mean duration of 3 minutes per task. Assessments revealed distinctive cognitive profiles and loaded onto four independent factors. CONCLUSIONS A digital toolbox of usable, scalable, and self-administrable assessments that can evaluate brain health at a glance (and longitudinally) may lead to novel potential applications across clinical trials, diagnostics, and performance optimization not previously permitted. CLINICALTRIAL Not applicable