Cognitive Testing on Mobile Phones

Mobile phones are the most portable of all testing platforms. Tests can run on any JavaŽ phone. Large numbers of people already own suitable phones and are familiar with using them. Thus large scale studies involving data collection during the person's daily life are practical. The phone can automatically transmit results to the server allowing data to be reviewed immediately. The main limitation is screen size, but all the core tests can be run on a standard mobile phone. The test illustrated on the left is the arrow flanker task. The response is a left or right key press corresponding  to the direction of the central arrow.
The test on the right is the arrow RT task, a very simple psychomotor task which requires a left or right button press corresponding to the direction of the arrow. This differs from the flanker task in that there is no distracting information. We have used this test in a study on the effects of intravenous infusions of propofol in patients. This was recently presented at the Society for Intravenous Anaesthesia

Tests for mobile phone projects are set up as custom packages. Tests are also available for handheld PDAs and for PC (both standalone and running in a web browser).

Brian Tiplady is a pioneer in developing this type of application for the mobile phone. Some of the data has been presented at recent scientific meetings. The first (Tiplady 2004, British Psychological Society) was an initial evaluation in which a mobile phone was used in a lab-based study. The second (Tiplady, Paterson, Scholey 2005, European Behavioural Pharmacology Society) took the mobile phone into peoples' homes, and assessed cognitive function in an everyday setting. The phone automatically sent data back to the central server. Both these studies showed that reaction time increased with task complexity, as illustrated on the right.. This helps to confirm that volunteers are "on-task", especially important when testing is in an unsupervised environment. 

 

Mobile phones can also be used to administer mood scales, for example visual analogue scales. Paper scales are usually 100 mm long, while limitations of screen size means that scales on a mobile phone are much shorter. A study presented recently at the British Psychological Society showed that 21 mm scales on a mobile phone are just as sensitive to change as 100 mm paper scales