Title: Spaced retrieval therapy mobile application for Alzheimer's patients: a usability testing

Authors: Kholoud Aljedaani; Reem Alnanih

Addresses: Computer Science Department, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia ' Computer Science Department, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Abstract: Alzheimer's disease is the most common type of dementia. Spaced retrieval therapy (SRT) is a non-pharmacological therapy for Alzheimer's disease that helps reduce the high cost of the treatments. The authors developed a mobile application-based SRT with two different interfaces. The first interface, the default interface, is designed based on elderly people's implications. The second interface, called the adapted interface, is designed based on the implications of elderly people with cognitive impairments. The paper presents the findings on its usability that included 20 older adults divided into two groups (ten healthy and ten with Alzheimer's). The result of the tasks confirmed that the Alzheimer's group needed more time to complete the tasks than the healthy elderly group. Based on the post-task questionnaire, the healthy elderly group finds the default user interface simpler than the adapted one, which contrasts with the Alzheimer's patients. Alzheimer's patients performed faster in the adapted interface.

Keywords: spaced retrieval therapy; SRT; Alzheimer's patients; usability testing; mobile application; designing a user interface.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2023.132153

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2023 Vol.26 No.4, pp.361 - 371

Received: 25 Jan 2022
Received in revised form: 10 May 2022
Accepted: 01 Jun 2022
Published online: 12 Jul 2023 *

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