Increasing the number of dementia patients is one of the big social problems in Japan. According to the official report published by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, it is expected that 20% of the elderly will have dementia in 2025. Currently, many welfare facilities monitor dementia in elderly people by employing a variety of special tests. For instance, ClockDrawing Test (CDT) are used to evaluate a patient’s cognitive functions. These tests can help to evaluate a patient's dementia type and observe its progression as time-series data (aging variation data). Moreover, the obtained results can be employed to improve the patient’s Quality Of Life.
In the field of medical and welfare sciences, it is important to conduct the tests regularly. These evaluation tests, however, have some problems as follows. First, some elderly persons become very nervous about taking the evaluation tests. As a result, the obtained results do not reflect a patient’s cognitive functions accurately. Second, these evaluation tests should be conducted regularly to assess a patient’s cognitive function due to the changes in the patient’s cognitive function depending on the date, place, situation, etc. Therefore, conducting these tests demands the medical staff and care workers' time. It is also desirable for the evaluation tests to be sufficiently easy and not stressful for the subjects. If the given tests are difficult and stressful for subjects, they will never be used. Finally, time-dependent changes in the progression of dementia need to be measured, visualized, and analyzed.
Our final goal is to develop an evaluation system of dementia progression using daily actions. In this project, we focus on eye movement during simple recreation games. A recreational system with a simple game is developed to measure a subject’s eye movement, and we are now discussing useful eye movement features.