VRNPT: A Neuropsychological Test Tool for Diagnosing Mild Cognitive Impairment Using Virtual Reality and EEG Signals.

Mild cognitive impairment is associated with many neurodegenerative diseases. It is essential to detect mild cognitive impairment on time to reduce the prevalence of such disorders. Nevertheless, present clinically employed test scales and biomarkers are time-consuming, user-unfriendly, and expensive. Hence, we developed a neuropsychological test system based on virtual reality in this study, the Virtual Reality Neuropsychological Mild Cognitive Impairment Test (VRNPT). The diagnosis and classification of MCI were achieved by effectively combining digital cognitive parameters and EEG signal features obtained during the VRNPT cognitive task. The VRNPT contains three head-mounted display-based cognitive tasks that assess participants' attention, memory, spatial perception, working memory, and visuospatial executive ability across multiple cognitive domains of functioning. We investigated how to design and optimize these tasks. We conducted a field study by recruiting 80 participants (40 MCI patients and 40 normal older adults). The results showed that the classification accuracy of combining digitized cognitive parameters and EEG signals during VRNPT was 91.3%, higher than using only digitized parameters from VRNPT and applying EEG signals alone, demonstrating the validity and feasibility of this method for diagnosing MCI. The user satisfaction survey showed that the subjects were satisfied with VRNPT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]