Toward Personalized Cognitive Training for Elderly with Mild Cognitive Impairment: Cerebral Blood Flow Activation during Verbally-Based Cognitive Activities

Abstract

This paper presents a verbally-based cognitive task for elderly with mild cognitive impairment. As designed with conscious of daily conversation, the task is done by oral answering some questionnaire. An elderly firstly talks about the topics of favorite season, travel, gourmet, and daily life, and then he/she does three cognitive tasks of reminiscence task, category recall, and working memory task. With the use of the functional nearinfrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which can measure cerebral blood flow activation non-invasively, we had collected 42 CHs fNIRS signals on frontal and right and left temporal areas from 22 elderly participants (7 males and 15 females between ages of 64 to 89) during cognitive tests in a specialized medical institute. All participates are classified into three clinical groups: elderly individuals with cognitively normal controls (CN), patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and mild Alzheimer's disease (AD). Toward personalized cognitive training, we report a task effect measurement by the statistical tests of fNIRS signals.Index Terms-verbally-based cognitive training to prevent cognitive impairment from elderlies, cerebral blood flow activation during a cognitive task, functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)