Feasibility of a developed reaction time test APP for assessing cognitive function and associated fall risks in the elderly

Abstract

Older adults show increased risk of falling and major risk factors include impaired postural balance and cognitive function. The purpose of this study is to investigate the feasibility and potential efficacy of our developed reaction time test APP for assessing cognitive function and associated fall risks in the elderly. The developed APP was tested on sixty Korean female adults, consisting of 20 young controls, 20 old non-fallers, and 20 matched old fallers. The simple sensorimotor response time and information processing speed for making decision of each participant were derived through a log-linear regression between the reaction time and number of alternative choices based on Hick’s law. Results showed the young control group had significantly shorter simple sensorimotor response time and faster information processing speed (p<0.001) than old non-faller group. It was also found that even though there was no significant difference between old fallers and non-fallers on the simple sensorimotor response time (p=0.517), the faller group had significantly slower information processing speed than the non-faller group (p=0.002). Further receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis revealed acceptable discriminative ability of information processing speed on classifying old fallers and non-fallers (Area under ROC curve=0.74). The optimal cutoff value of information processing speed was 6.4 bit/second, resulting in sensitivity of 85% and specificity of 65%. These findings showed that the developed reaction time test APP is feasible and has potential efficacy on assessing cognitive function and associated fall risks in the elderly.