New Publication: Monitoring Cognitive Ability in Patients with Moderate Dementia Using a Modified “Whack-a-Mole”

New Publication: Monitoring Cognitive Ability in Patients with Moderate Dementia Using a Modified “Whack-a-Mole”

Venue: International Symposium on Medical Measurements and Applications. IEEE. May 7, 2017. Rochester. USA. – Accepted


This paper is the result of an ongoing collaboration with the Carleton University, the Bruyère Research Institute, and the Elisabeth Bruyère Hospital, in Ottawa, Canada. in which PhyDSL has been used to build mobile games with rehabilitation purposes. 

Abstract: This paper presents results from the first 2 months of a 1-year study of 12 moderate dementia patients that participate in a weekly adult day program within a local community-care access center. The 12 patients are using a tablet-based whack-a-mole game, instrumented to record the user’s behavior; this record is analyzed to extract indicators, as potential proxies of cognitive ability. Our partnership with the adult day program greatly eased recruitment: all but 1 eligible participant joined our study. The measurements recorded by the game include the detailed user progression through the game levels. There are two unique aspects to the design of our game: first, it includes two distinct targets requiring different actions, which increases the cognitive processing in the tap task for the users; second, each level is systematically more difficult than the last.

The results show that the patients’ performance within the game improves over the first few weeks; this indicates that they are learning the game and retaining ability gains from week to week, which is unexpected in dementia patients. Subsequently they appear to reach a performance plateau, with consistent performance from one week to the next. The performance levels are compared to their MMSE Total score and MMSE Orientation for Time subscore and they are shown to have a maximum correlation of 0.465 and 0.654 respectively. These results demonstrate the potential for the whack-a-mole game to provide an ongoing measurement alternative for the MMSE and specifically the Orientation for Time sub-score that is a predictor of future decline.

Authors: Wallace, B., Knoefel, F., Goubran, R., Masson, P., Baker, A., Allard, B., Stroulia, E., Guana, V.
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New Publication: End-to-end Model-transformation Comprehension Through Fine-grained Traceability Information

New Publication: End-to-end Model-transformation Comprehension Through Fine-grained Traceability Information
Journal: Information. International Journal on Software and Systems Modeling (SoSYM) – Accepted

Abstract: The construction and maintenance of model-to-model and model-to-text transformations pose numerous challenges to novice and expert developers. A key challenge involves tracing dependency relationships between artifacts of a transformation ecosystem. This is required to assess the impact of metamodel evolution, to determine metamodel coverage, and to debug complex transformation expressions.

This paper presents an empirical study that investigates the performance of developers reflecting on the execution semantics of model-to-model and model-to-text transformations. We measured the accuracy and efficiency of 25 developers completing a variety of traceability-driven tasks in 2 model-based code generators. We compared the performance of developers using ChainTracker, a traceability-analysis environment developed by our team, and that of developers using Eclipse Modeling.

We present statistically significant evidence that ChainTracker improves the performance of developers reflecting on the execution semantics of transformation ecosystems. We discuss how developers supported by off-the-shelf development environments are unable to effectively identify dependency relationships in non-trivial model-transformation chains.

Authors: Victor Guana and Eleni Stroulia
Source: V.G. – RSS