Performance-based assessment of telephone use in three patients with a major cognitive disorder
L. Quillion-Dupré, E. Monfort, C. Lissot, V. Rialle, P. Couturier
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AbstractBackground: In Major Neurocognitive Disorders (MND), cognitive deficits have considerable consequences on patients’ daily living, compromising their social, professional, or leisure activities. In this context, technologies may provide innovative solutions to support home support and boost loss-making capacity. Therefore, it is necessary to design appropriate devices but also rehabilitation interventions, considered early on in order to minimize the impact of cognitive impairments on daily living. This requires undertaking a detailed assessment of autonomy. Research aim: In this context, we wanted to confirm the contributions of a performance-based assessment to define the challenges faced by people with a diagnosis of MND using the telephone, the most common communication tool, and to specify their ability to benefit from hierarchical cueing. Methods: We compared three patients with a diagnosis of MND to 17 elderly people aged 74 to 91, living in the community, and without any cognitive impairment. We evaluated the telephone useability in an ecological structured context with three tasks of increasing difficulty adapted from the Observed Tasks of Daily Living-R (Diehl, Marsiske, & Horgas, 2005). Performances were analyzed with an observation grid from the Profinteg tool (Anselme et al., 2013), completed by an error taxonomy based on Schwartz description (Schwartz et al., 1998; Schwartz et al., 1995). Results: Results highlighted that the three patients, who presented cognitive deficits and who apparently did not face obvious difficulties in telephone use assessed with a pencil-and-paper questionnaire, presented different error patterns and needed more specific aids, and in greater number. Conclusion: The findings indicate a dissociation between neuropsychological tests’ performances and telephone use in daily life. This result underlines the need for direct structured observation of older persons’ daily activities requiring technical and technological tools, in the way to predict the practical consequences of cognitive impairments, and for designing appropriate gerontechnologies.Keywords: Activities of daily living (ADL), telephone, performance-based assessment, Major Neurocognitive Disorder
L. Quillion-Dupré, E. Monfort, C. Lissot, V. Rialle, P. Couturier (2020). Performance-based assessment of telephone use in three patients with a major cognitive disorder. Gerontechnology, 19(1), 54-65
https://doi.org/10.4017/gt.2020.19.1.006.00