Cognitive Assessments: HeadMinder, ANAM, and more

Just saw a very inter­est­ing press release regard­ing com­put­er-based neu­rocog­ni­tive assess­ments — a crit­i­cal part of the brain fit­ness puz­zle. How long will it take before con­sumers can have access to a reli­able and cred­i­ble annu­al “men­tal check-up”/ cog­ni­tive baseline?

Head­Min­der Cog­ni­tive Sta­bil­i­ty Index: Com­put­er­ized Neu­rocog­ni­tive … (Press release)

- “The Head­Min­der web-based Cog­ni­tive Sta­bil­i­ty Index (CSI) has proven more use­ful for blast-con­cus­sion detec­tion than the ANAM com­put­er­ized test bat­tery the DoD cur­rent­ly employs. The CSI pro­vides an imme­di­ate solu­tion to clear the back­log of 400,000 IED-exposed ser­vice mem­bers in less than two years.”

- “The CSI is a 30-minute, Inter­net-based, com­put­er­ized test that pro­vides auto­mat­ed, objec­tive mea­sures of atten­tion, mem­o­ry, response speed, and pro­cess­ing speed for ini­tial eval­u­a­tion of cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing. The CSI pro­duces stan­dard­ized reports that enable triage and deci­sion-mak­ing appro­pri­ate to a user’s qual­i­fi­ca­tions — from medic to neu­ropsy­chol­o­gist to neu­rol­o­gist and oth­er treat­ment team members.”

We cov­ered this emerg­ing type of assess­ments in the arti­cle Com­put­er­ized Cog­ni­tive Assess­ments: oppor­tu­ni­ties and concerns

- “In fact, one of the key high­lights from the mar­ket report we released in March was that “Large-scale, ful­ly-auto­mat­ed cog­ni­tive assess­ments are being used in a grow­ing num­ber of clin­i­cal tri­als. This opens the way for the devel­op­ment of inex­pen­sive con­sumer-fac­ing, base­line cog­ni­tive assess­ments.” And we pro­filed a few lead­ing com­pa­nies in the space: Brain Resource Com­pa­ny, Cog­ni­tive Drug Research, CNS Vital Signs and CogState.”

- “Brain sci­en­tists don’t rec­og­nize one over­all “brain age” or “intel­li­gence”. We can view our brain func­tions or cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties as a vari­ety of skills, some more per­cep­tion-relat­ed, some more mem­o­ry-relat­ed, some more lan­guage-relat­ed, some more visu­al, some more abstract-think­ing and plan­ning ori­ent­ed. There is no gen­er­al “brain age” that can be mea­sured or trained in a mean­ing­ful way.”