Cognitive Task Virtualization for Alzheimer's Diagnosis Using Realistic VR Simulation

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that worsens the patient's cognitive ability over time. This would affect the patient's cognitive ability, which would impact their daily quality of life. Through early diagnosis and testing, the patient can be diagnosed with the current condition of cognitive impairment. The existing method of assessing cognitive ability is through paper-based examinations, such as the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) or the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). However, these examinations, which use paper and verbal answers, would provide a low ecological approach when it comes to testing the patient's cognitive performance. The availability of Virtual Reality technology, which enables the realistic simulation of real-life tasks, allows for more natural and practical testing of cognitive domains, presenting a potential for improvement in cognitive assessment. This research would adapt eight cognitive domains from the Montréal Cognitive Assessment and transform them into various simulation tasks to test the patient's ability. The simulation will be fully executed and operated using virtual reality devices to create immersive experiences. In the future, this VR simulation will be utilized to diagnose the severity of Alzheimer's Disease.