Everyday Activities.

Introduction: Oral health defects significantly affect the individual's general health and ability to carry out everyday activities. People like farm workers, construction workers, and migratory workers do not have access to dental care, significantly influencing their overall quality of life. People with ongoing dental pain have nutritional deficiency consequences. Materials and Method: A questionnaire-based study was conducted among 420 construction workers in Chennai. Individuals who expressed a willingness to participate were enrolled in the study. The oral health-related quality of life was evaluated using the Oral Health Impact Profile -14 scale. The cognitive ability of the individuals was assessed using the Symptoms of Early Dementia 11 questionnaire, and the nutritional status was assessed using the Mini Nutritional Assessment. The results were tabulated and statistically analyzed using SPSS software. Results: A statistically significant association was found between Oral health-related quality of life , cognitive ability , and nutritional status of construction workers . A strong positive correlation was found between the variables such as oral health-related quality of life and nutritional status. Conclusion: From this study, we can conclude that the oral health-related quality of life, cognitive ability, and nutritional status of the construction workers in Chennai is overall low, and importance to be given on their oral health and also general health since low nutritional status can affect their general health too.

Assessments by Patients With Schizophrenia and Psychiatrists of Relative Risk of Research Procedures

Tests made of the sensory-perceptual, cognitive, and psychomotor abilities of untreated young patients with essential hypertension have revealed a pattern suggesting a slight functional impairment of the central nervous system. Reduced performance was most marked for those tasks requiring speed and psychomotor coordination, particularly when the behaviors observed were self-initiated. Lowered scores were more evident among female hypertensives; no differences in performance by race were noted. The deficits measured by these sensitive tests do not appear to be great enough to intrude on everyday activity nor to impair work ability. Changes that may result from blood-pressure-lowering therapies will require further study.

Rapid individual cognitive phenotyping holds the potential to revolutionize domains as wide-ranging as personalized learning, employment practices, and precision psychiatry. Going beyond limitations imposed by traditional lab-based experiments, new efforts have been underway toward greater ecological validity and participant diversity to capture the full range of individual differences in cognitive abilities and behaviors across the general population. Building on this, we developed Skill Lab, a novel game-based tool that simultaneously assesses a broad suite of cognitive abilities while providing an engaging narrative. Skill Lab consists of six mini-games as well as 14 established cognitive ability tasks. Using a popular citizen science platform (N = 10,725), we conducted a comprehensive validation in the wild of a game-based cognitive assessment suite. Based on the game and validation task data, we constructed reliable models to simultaneously predict eight cognitive abilities based on the users' in-game behavior. Follow-up validation tests revealed that the models can discriminate nuances contained within each separate cognitive ability as well as capture a shared main factor of generalized cognitive ability. Our game-based measures are five times faster to complete than the equivalent task-based measures and replicate previous findings on the decline of certain cognitive abilities with age in our large cross-sectional population sample (N = 6369). Taken together, our results demonstrate the feasibility of rapid in-the-wild systematic assessment of cognitive abilities as a promising first step toward population-scale benchmarking and individualized mental health diagnostics.

Emotion, mood, and stress recognition (EMSR) has been studied in laboratory settings for decades. In particular, physiological signals are widely used to detect and classify affective states in lab conditions. However, physiological reactions to emotional stimuli have been found to differ in laboratory and natural settings. Thanks to recent technological progress (e.g., in wearables) the creation of EMSR systems for a large number of consumers during their everyday activities is increasingly possible. Therefore, datasets created in the wild are needed to insure the validity and the exploitability of EMSR models for real-life applications. In this paper, we initially present common techniques used in laboratory settings to induce emotions for the purpose of physiological dataset creation. Next, advantages and challenges of data collection in the wild are discussed. To assess the applicability of existing datasets to real-life applications, we propose a set of categories to guide and compare at a glance different methodologies used by researchers to collect such data. For this purpose, we also introduce a visual tool called Graphical Assessment of Real-life Application-Focused Emotional Dataset (GARAFED). In the last part of the paper, we apply the proposed tool to compare existing physiological datasets for EMSR in the wild and to show possible improvements and future directions of research. We wish for this paper and GARAFED to be used as guidelines for researchers and developers who aim at collecting affect-related data for real-life EMSR-based applications.

The application of neuroscience and neuroengineering methodologies to the study of product marketing is a new research area at the intersection of neuromarketing, neuroeconomics and consumer neuroscience. This emerging multidisciplinary field aims to better understand consumers and their interaction with products and services beyond the traditional self-report surveys and articulated responses from focus groups. Consumers make decisions every day, especially when deciding what food products to purchase or consume, yet little is known about how advertising and preparation affects those decisions. Knowing the main factors that influence consumers' food and drink choices provides important information for better understanding factors that affect consumers' preferences and purchase decisions. Currently, there is a disparity that current market research is not able to address between consumer attitudes and actual purchasing behavior. Therefore, by better understanding the factors influencing consumer preferences, it could lead to better success of products in the market. With traditional self-reported measures, consumers may not be able to fully articulate their preferences. Therefore, use of objective measures could complement self-reported measures to provide a richer more in-depth analysis of consumer decision making and preferences. In this thesis, we take a neuroergonomics approach and dovetail traditional self-reported approaches with objective neural measures to better understand consumer tendencies and preferences and how they affect their consumption behavior. This thesis will provide several novel contributions to the knowledge base that can further consumer neuroscience research. First, we utilized a multimodal approach to better understand food consumption and preferences. By utilizing this method, it is possible to add information to understanding the user experience by combining self-reported and behavioral measures with neural physiological data. This will be able to provide a more comprehensive analysis. Second, we investigated the effect of machine user interface ergonomics on consumer experience in a naturalistic office setting. In a neuroergonomic study, we investigated two competing coffee machine interfaces while users interacted with the machines. Users prepared and consumed hot drinks in a realistic office setting and were continuously monitored with wireless brain and body sensors. By allowing participants to move around untethered in a simulated office environment where they are able to interact with the machines and the product, we are able to get better responses that would be representative of real-world preferences. Next, we investigated the effect of different hot beverages on cognition and on consumer preference. In a controlled multi-day study, we explored coffee and tea products and how they influence consumer preference and cognitive ability. By investigating the effects of the ingredients in different coffee and tea products will help gain knowledge into the effects they have on cognitive ability and consumer preferences. Further, there has been a trend of increasing products on the market that provide a benefit to the consumer. By comparing these products to traditional hot beverages, we were able to better understand how these types of product further affect consumer preferences and consumption behavior. Lastly, we investigated the role of food advertisements on product likeability and how they affect consumption behavior. Advertising for food has been shown to have a significant influence on food consumption behaviors. By investigating the neural correlates while viewing food and non-food advertisements we can better understand the effect of the advertisements on consumers preferences and willingness to buy products. By combining both self-reported, behavioral and neurophysiological measures we were able to comprehensively and objectively understand different factors that affect consumer preferences for food products. The findings of this research can be used to enhance our understanding of food choices and purchase behavior, optimize methodology used for food consumption studies and provide guidance for further research in consumer neuroscience studies.

Objectives. Schizophrenia has a debilitating impact on a patient's cognitive functioning and everyday activities. As a part of the treatment, schizophrenia patients attend sessions of cognitive remediation to restore impaired cognitive abilities. To combine cognitive and real life training, this study presents a virtual task to use in cognitive rehabilitation and assessment. Virtual Supermarket Shopping Task (VSST) simulates a shopping activity, in which participants have to memorize and collect items from a virtual supermarket. The aim of this study is to establish its validity for use in clinical practice. Sample and setting. Twenty patients suffering from chronic schizophrenia and twenty healthy controls were tested. Each participant completed the task and a battery of standard neuropsychological tests. Statistical analyses. Groups’ results were compared by Student’s t-tests. Validity of VSST was examined using correlations with standard neuropsychological measures. Several VSST metrics, such as trial difficulty, distances and times, and the effect the extraneous variables have on VSST measures were investigated using analyses of variance and mixed effect models. Results. The analyses demonstrate that patients perform worse in VSST than healthy controls and their performance corresponds to their mnemonic abilities measured by standard neuropsychological tests. VSST performance relates to the level of executive functioning only in patients. There was no effect of gaming experience on VSST performance. While potential gender effect has to be addressed in future studies, age seems to play a role in the additional VSST measures (trial time and distance). Study limitations. Subjects were tested only once and therefore long term benefits of using VSST in rehabilitation could not be investigated. Only schizophrenia patients were included in the sample, which reduces generalizability of results to other psychiatric and neurologic conditions.

Children born preterm (<37 weeks’ gestation) show a specific vulnerability for socio-emotional difficulties, which may lead to an increased likelihood of developing behavioral and psychiatric problems in adolescence and adulthood. The accurate decoding of emotional signals from faces represents a fundamental prerequisite for early social interactions, allowing children to derive information about others’ feelings and intentions. The present study aims to explore possible differences between preterm and full-term children in the ability to detect emotional expressions, as well as possible relationships between this ability and socio-emotional skills and problem behaviors during everyday activities. We assessed 55 school-age children (n = 34 preterm and n = 21 full-term) with a cognitive battery that ensured comparable cognitive abilities between the two groups. Moreover, children were asked to identify emotional expressions from pictures of peers’ faces (Emotion Recognition Task). Finally, children’s emotional, social and behavioral outcomes were assessed with parent-reported questionnaires. The results revealed that preterm children were less accurate than full-term children in detecting positive emotional expressions and they showed poorer social and behavioral outcomes. Notably, correlational analyses showed a relationship between the ability to recognize emotional expressions and socio-emotional functioning. The present study highlights that early difficulties in decoding emotional signals from faces may be critically linked to emotional and behavioral regulation problems, with important implications for the development of social skills and effective interpersonal interactions.

to study the sensitivity and specificity of fall detection using mobile phone technology. an experimental investigation using motion signals detected by the mobile phone. the research was conducted in a laboratory setting, and 18 healthy adults (12 males and 6 females; age = 29 ± 8.7 years) were recruited. each participant was requested to perform three trials of four different types of simulated falls (forwards, backwards, lateral left and lateral right) and eight other everyday activities (sit-to-stand, stand-to-sit, level walking, walking up- and downstairs, answering the phone, picking up an object and getting up from supine). Acceleration was measured using two devices, a mobile phone and an independent accelerometer attached to the waist of the participants. Bland-Altman analysis shows a higher degree of agreement between the data recorded by the two devices. Using individual upper and lower detection thresholds, the specificity and sensitivity for mobile phone were 0.81 and 0.77, respectively, and for external accelerometer they were 0.82 and 0.96, respectively. fall detection using a mobile phone is a feasible and highly attractive technology for older adults, especially those living alone. It may be best achieved with an accelerometer attached to the waist, which transmits signals wirelessly to a phone.

Conversational agents (CA) are increasingly used to manage and coordinate household chores and everyday activities at home. However, these technologies should be adaptive to age-specific characteristics in order to be considered beneficial for the ageing population. This study presents a participatory design of a conversational agent to provide cognitive support in recipe following and nutrition advice for adults aged 65 and over. Through a qualitative thematic analysis, the study explores older adults’ expectations, interactions and experiences with the agent in order to identify age-specific challenges of interacting with CAs. Data consists of a participatory design workshop with eight older adults (aged 65 and over), followed by a Wizard of Oz study with ten older adults interacting with the agent in the kitchen environment in a laboratory setting. Results demonstrate that older adults consider conversational agents as beneficial for providing personalised recipe recommendations, advising the user to choose appropriate ingredients and reminding them of their dietary intake. When interacting with the agent older adults displayed challenges with confirmation and repetition, questioning and correcting, the lack of conversational responses, and difficulties in hearing and understanding the multi-modal interaction. Older adults experience agents as collaborators, but not as conversational partners. The study concludes that the accessibility and inclusiveness of conversational agents regarding voice interaction could be improved by further developing participatory methods with older adults.

The useful-field-of-view (UFOV) test measures the amount of information someone can extract from a visual scene in one glance. Its scores show relatively strong relationships with everyday activities. The UFOV test consists of three computer tests, suggested to measure processing speed and central vision, divided attention, and selective attention. However, other functions seem to be involved as well. In order to investigate the contribution of these suggested and other perceptual and cognitive functions, we performed a meta-analysis of 116 Pearson's correlation coefficients between UFOV scores and other test scores reported in 18 peer-reviewed articles. We divided these correlations into nine domains: attention, executive functioning, general cognition, memory, spatial ability, visual closure, contrast sensitivity, visual processing speed, and visual acuity. A multivariate mixed-effects model analysis revealed that each domain correlated significantly with each of the UFOV subtest scores. These correlations were stronger for Subtests 2 and 3 than for Subtest 1. Furthermore, some domains were more strongly correlated to the UFOV than others across subtests. We did not find interaction effects between subtest and domain, indicating that none of the UFOV subtests is more selectively sensitive to a particular domain than the others. Thus, none of the three UFOV subtests seem to measure one clear construct. Instead, a range of visual and cognitive functions is involved. Perhaps this is the reason for the UFOV's high ecological validity, as it involves many functions at once, making it harder to compensate if one of them fails.

SmartAction-VR uses virtual reality to simulate daily life tasks and assess cognitive performance based on the multi-errand paradigm. This study explored whether this new task could provide insights into the executive functioning of children and adolescents with ADHD in their everyday activities. A cross-sectional study was conducted between November 2021 and December 2022. It consisted of one session and was divided into two parts (cognitive tests; and SmartAction-VR). The sample comprised 76 children and adolescents with a median age (IQR) of 13 (11-14) years and an age range of 9-17 years. Of these participants, 60.50% (n = 46) were males. Out of this sample, 40 participants were in the ADHD group and 36 were in the neurotypical group. The following instruments were used: Waisman Activities of Daily Living Scale, Assessment of Sensory Processing and Executive Functioning, Pediatric Simulator Disease Questionnaire, Digit span subtest, Stroop test, NEPSY-II Subtest of Auditory Attention and Cognitive Flexibility, Trail Making Test, Zoo Map Test, and SmartAction-VR. The ADHD group demonstrated lower accuracy (U = 406, p = 0.010), higher values for total errors (U = 292, p = 0.001), more commissions (U = 417, p = 0.003), new actions (U = 470, p = 0.014), and forgetting actions (U = 406, p = 0.010), as well as fewer perseverations compared to the neurotypical group (U = 540.5, p = 0.029). Additionally, participants who forgot more actions were found to have lower independence in daily life (r = -0.281, p = 0.024). The correlations between the results of SmartAction-VR and activities of daily living, as well as cognitive tests, suggest that this new task could be useful for evaluating executive functioning in daily life.

Declines in functional status (i.e., activities of daily living (ADLs) which include instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) and basic-self care activities of daily living (BADLs) are a necessary feature of a dementia diagnosis. Furthermore, such declines are associated with decreased quality of life, institutionalization risk, and death for patients as well as increased caregiver burden. Thus, understanding the cognitive correlates of functional status in individuals with dementia, and specifically Alzheimer's disease (AD), is important. The present study explored relationships between cognitive capacities and performance of everyday activities among patients with dementia. The contribution of memory and executive dysfunction (two well studied areas) as well as higher level visual perceptual processes (a less well studied domain) to overall ADL functioning was examined in a group of patients diagnosed with probable AD. Contrary to predictions, memory, executive dysfunction, nor visuoperceptual abilities contributed significantly to impairments in ADLs when cognitive status was taken into account. Rather, a global measure of dementia severity was the only significant predictor of overall ADL performance, accounting for 35% of the variance in a regression model. This finding is consistent with the results of a number of other investigations (e.g., Giovannetti et al., 2002). Furthermore, it is consistent with the resource theory (Schwartz et al., 1998), which proposes that naturalistic actions, such as ADLs, demand cognitive resources. A depletion of these resources results in naturalistic action impairments and difficulties. Thus, the more limited the cognitive resources, the more difficulty one will experiencing when performing an ADL task. Given the multi-factorial nature of functions assessed in a composite index of ADLs, it may be that these are best predicted by more global measures of overall cognitive ability, rather than discrete cognitive capacities. Further investigations may examine whether impairments in more specific functional activities are associated with deficits in discrete cognitive domains.

Comparison Between Common Performance-Based Tests and Self-Reports of Physical Function in People With Multiple Sclerosis: Does Sex or Gender Matter?

Dementia is the seventh leading cause of mortality, and a major source of disability and dependency in older individuals globally. Cognitive decline (and, to a lesser extent, normal ageing) are associated with sleep fragmentation and loss of slow-wave sleep. Evidence suggests a bidirectional causal link between these losses. Phase-locked auditory stimulation has emerged as a promising non-invasive tool to enhance slow-wave sleep, potentially ameliorating cognitive decline. In laboratory settings, auditory stimulation is usually supervised by trained experts. Different algorithms (simple amplitude thresholds, topographic correlation, sine-wave fitting, phase-locked loop, and phase vocoder) are used to precisely target auditory stimulation to a desired phase of the slow wave. While all algorithms work well in younger adults, the altered sleep physiology of older adults and particularly those with neurodegenerative disorders requires a tailored approach that can adapt to older adults' fragmented sleep and reduced amplitudes of slow waves. Moreover, older adults might require a continuous intervention that is not feasible in laboratory settings. Recently, several auditory stimulation-capable portable devices ('Dreem®', 'SmartSleep®' and 'SleepLoop®') have been developed. We discuss these three devices regarding their potential as tools for science, and as clinical remote-intervention tools to combat cognitive decline. Currently, SleepLoop® shows the most promise for scientific research in older adults due to high transparency and customizability but is not commercially available. Studies evaluating down-stream effects on cognitive abilities, especially in patient populations, are required before a portable auditory stimulation device can be recommended as a clinical preventative remote-intervention tool.