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I started in the pharmaceutical industry in 1976, as a neuroscientist
with Astra (the Swedish pharmaceutical company) working in Edinburgh. Many of the
older drugs used in psychiatry are very sedative, which causes problems
with driving, and can also be unpleasant for patients. In order to show
that newer drugs were less sedative we needed to
study reaction times, hand-eye coordination, memory and so on. One of my
early tasks was to put together a test battery, which in those days meant
some tests using pencil and paper timed with a stopwatch, and a
few using custom-built electronic equipment. Then in the late 70s, we
started to see computers that were small and inexpensive enough to
dedicate to cognitive testing. I first programmed a cognitive test battery
on a Sharp MZ80K, and then moved to the BBC micro. Some of the tests
were computer versions of existing tests, others we built from scratch. We
soon had a cognitive battery which was used both for evaluating new
drugs and for assessing patients with cognitive impairment, e.g. with
dementia.
I was also interested in doing basic research on drugs, evaluating
their effects on different aspect of performance in order to better
understand their mechanisms of action. This interest has continued to the
present day, and has involved a variety of drugs including alcohol. I have
also been involved in studying the time course of drug action, and how it
relates to the absorption and elimination of the drug in the body.
In the 1980s. my work in the pharmaceutical industry moved from
clinical research to data management and statistics, so I learned a lot
about running computer networks and supporting users, as well as the
processes involved in handling of data from large scale projects. Some of
the biggest headaches were in studies using patient diaries, where
patients enter their symptoms at home every day. This generated
enormous volumes of data, often of uncertain quality. When small handheld
computers came in, we rapidly saw their potential as devices for patients
to use at home, as the pen interface is an easy and natural one for those
who are not computer experts. We set up evaluation studies on the Apple
Newton in 1994, and showed that patients liked these devices, and that
this was a practical way of getting reliable data from patients' everyday
lives (see e.g. Tiplady et al., 1997)
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Handhelds also had obvious potential for cognitive testing.
They are very portable, and the pen interface allows ways of
programming a wider variety of tasks than a conventional PC. I started
programming for the Newton as soon as I could get my hands on the development
kit, and soon had my first working application, a letter cancellation task
(shown on the left). I demonstrated this at the British Pharmacological Society meeting
in December 1993. This was, I believe, the first published report of the
use of a pen computer to carry out a psychological test. Since then, I
have set up a wide range of tests on the Newton, resulting in a
comprehensive, portable, easy to use test battery which is still in use,
though the Newton was discontinued in 1998. See Cameron
et al. (2001) for a description and validation data.
Times move on, and portable electronics now means handhelds such as the
Palm Pilot, and mobile phones. I am working on both types of platform.
They each have their place, with the mobile phone having the potential to
run large studies at low cost on peoples' own phones, while the handhelds
are more versatile, in particular having a larger screen and a pen
interface (though of course the boundary between mobile phones and
handheld PDAs is increasingly blurred).
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I still work with personal
computers, and I am increasingly interested in
the use of the web as a method of both recruiting volunteers and running
cognitive tests. There are a couple of current projects already running in
this area. PCs, handhelds and mobile phones are very different in many
ways, but they are all computers, and all programmed in similar ways. I
have been working in the JavaŽ language for some while now. This portable
language runs on all these platforms, and allows much of the code to be
used unchanged on all of them. This makes it much quicker to develop
systems, and ensures that they run in a standard way.
I left AstraZeneca in 2003, and now spend part of my time working with
patient diaries, the rest with cognitive testing. Most of this site is
about my work with automated cognitive testing, and the services I offer
as a consultant. However, all work and no play... so I've also included
links to some of the things that fascinate me in my time off. |