Using mobile phones as a cognitive testing platform raises a number of validation issues, including:

• Is the device capable of accurate timing?

• Is the software working as intended?

• Are tests with a small screen equivalent to other methods?

• Can unsupervised users cope with the tests?

• Are they using the system properly

• Are the tests capable of detecting the effects of interest?

Brian Tiplady recently gave a presentation on this topic at the International Conference of Applied Psychology in Melbourne (July 2010). He showed how these issues could be successfully addressed using a three level model. 

Click here to view the presentation

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Melbourne Presentation

We're all used to the idea of the breathalyser, but many drugs besides alcohol can impair driving - both legal drugs (such as antihistamines and sleeping pills) and illegal ones. These are much harder to measure than alcohol, so the UK police are developing methods of detecting impairment using cognitive tests on a small portable device. Brian Tiplady and a team in Edinburgh University have conducted a study to evaluate the sensitivity of this type of test to alcohol. An Edinburgh Evening News reporter has written of her experience as a volunteer in this study. There have also been reports on the project in the Telegraph and New Scientist. The full report of this study has now appeared as 

Dixon, P.R., Clark, T., Tiplady, B. (2009). Evaluation of a roadside impairment test device using alcohol. Accid Anal Prev. 41(3):412-8 [Abstract]

Brian Tiplady recently gave a presentation at the International Conference of Applied Psychology in Melbourne (July 2010). The talk was entitled "Portable approaches to assessing driver impairment", and gave some of the background to the roadside impairment project, and summarized the main findings.

Click here to view the presentation

You can now try out the Mobile Phone Cognitive Testing application free of charge. This is primarily an evaluation version, but includes fully functional tests and scales

The free version has some limitations. The tests are of fixed length (about 3 minutes each), and data options are limited to display of results on the screen. You can't transmit data over the web or store it on your phone's memory card. However the tests are the real thing, and you could use this version in small research projects, or for teaching purposes, as well as for getting to know the way the system works and whether it suits your needs.

Find out more about downloading the evaluation version

Divers deal with increased pressure all the time, and as depth increases so does the pressure. This can lead to a number of problems, one of which is the narcotic action of nitrogen that dissolves in the blood in increasing quantities, and causes effects similar to alcohol - the "raptures of the deep".

To study effects of pressure in the laboratory, researchers use a high pressure "hyperbaric" chamber. A difficulty with this is that conventional equipment, including PCs, may implode with the pressure. Mobile phones have been tested and shown to withstand pressures up to the equivalent of 50m of sea water, and so are suitable test devices.  Researchers in the University of Utrecht are using our mobile phone testing system to study cognitive effects of increased pressure. 

Read more about research using the Mobile Laboratory approach

Mobile phones are great devices for cognitive testing. They are highly portable, relatively inexpensive, and many people already own suitable phones and are familiar with using them. They can be used to carry out field studies, for example of the effects of alcohol. Such studies (aka "everyday life" or " naturalistic studies") have advantages over lab studies, which are artificial in using fixed doses and a setting very different from a normal drinking environment. But naturalistic studies are also less controlled than a lab setting. We have compared everyday life and lab assessments of alcohol effects in the same volunteers, and found that impairments can be clearly shown in both settings . Results from the study have been presented at three recent meetings, the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research in Toronto in May 2008, the British Association for Psychopharmacology in Harrogate in July 2008, and the British Psychological Society meeting at Low Wood, Windermere, in September 2008

Brian Tiplady has also given a presentation entitled "Ambulatory Cognitive Assessment: Measurement of Attention, Psychomotor Performance and Memory in an Everyday Life Setting", which covered some of these issues,  at the at the DIA Clinical Forum, Nice,  in October 2009.

The full report of this study has been published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. Read More

There are two main ways to present verbal memory tests, recall and recognition. Recognition tasks use a multiple-choice format, and are easy to automate. But they are easier than recall tasks, and may tap into a different type of memory. We need tasks that assess recollective memory,  but conventional recall tasks require a spoken or written response, which must be scored  as correct or incorrect. This is not easy to automate.

We have evaluated an alternative paradigm, first suggested by Frankhuizen et al. (1978). Words are presented paired with digits. The response to each word is then to press the corresponding number button. Since all of the set of digits are used for each stimulus set, response familiarity is not a valid cue, and only recollection can be used. The test is set up on a mobile phone, as shown on the left

We have assessed the test in an everyday study of the effects of alcohol, and showed that people who have consumed significant alcohol (at least 5 units in the past 6 hours) are impaired on this task. Results are similar to those seen previously using a word-list recall task. The study was presented as a poster at the Oxford meeting of the British Association for Psychopharmacology in July 2009. Click here to see the poster.

This is one of the simplest reaction time tests. If the arrow points left, press a left button, if it points right, press a right button. We've been using this test to follow sedation when patients receive an intravenous anaesthetic, and to check whether the effect on brain function follows the blood levels. Setting up the test on a mobile phone allowed us to test performance in a routine hospital setting, where bulky equipment would just get in the way. Reaction time testers don't get much smaller than this, but patients can use them without difficulty. The full report of the research has recently appeared in the journal Anaesthesia.