Development and evaluation of a web-based cognitive task generator for personalized cognitive training: A proof of concept study with stroke patients

Abstract

Cognitive impairments impose important limitations in the performance of activities of daily living. Although there is important evidence on cognitive rehabilitation benefits, its implementation is limited due to time and human resources demands. Moreover, many cognitive rehabilitation interventions lack a solid theoretical framework in the selection of paper-and-pencil tasks by the clinicians. In this endeavor, it would be useful to have a tool that could generate standardized paper-and-pencil tasks, parameterized according to patients' needs. In this paper, we combine the advantages of information and communication technologies with a participatory design approach with 20 health professionals to develop a novel cognitive rehabilitation web-tool: the NeuroRehabLab Task Generator (NTG). The NTG is a free and online available tool that systematically addresses multiple cognitive domains, and easily generates highly personalized paper-and-pencil training tasks. A field evaluation of the NTG with ten stroke patients showed moderate and strong correlations of patients' task performance with their cognitive assessment in multiple cognitive domains. That is, corroborating its usefulness both as an assessment and as rehabilitation tool.