-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Home
Neurological disorders have been a big problem for decades. The disease of the brain, spine, and the nerves are simply called as neurological disorders. Dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are the most prevalent types of these disorders. The most common types of dementia are Alzheimer’s disease and Vascular Dementia. In the year 2010, there were estimated 35.6 million people with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia worldwide (Wortmann, 2012). Memory loss and deterioration in cognitive functions can arise when Alzheimer’s disease starts affecting the body. Therefore, the lives of the patients are affected in the worst way. Results of the research show us that only %5 of the people have the early-onset of the disease before age 65 (Mendez, 2012).
Vascular dementia is the second most common dementia type after Alzheimer’s disease. Seventy-five percent of all strokes occur in individuals older than 65 years (Lee, 2011). It is caused by problems in the supply of blood to the brain, typically a series of minor strokes, leading to a worsening cognitive decline that occurs gradually. Beside that, most of the cases, doctors diagnose the Parkinson’s disease after age 60 (Çakmur, 2011). Dementia becomes common in the advanced stages of the disease (Sigurlaug, 2016).
Early diagnosis is very vital for the dementia. Taking precautions about the disease may increase patients’ life quality. These precautions can be decreasing alcohol consumption, applying suitable diet, physical activities and taking supplements (Arab et Al., 2011). In general, dementia patients visit their doctor on their issues about the memory. Before that, they and their family actually could not realize if they have the dementia.
There are dozens of tests online for finding out whether you have the symptoms of the diseases (Babacan, 2012). Some of these have their own evaluation criteria which allow you to view your test results personally. On the other hand, most of them are not suitable for self-evaluation. These tests are being applied and reviewed by the professionals. Because of this reason, our project aims that people can check their mental status before getting any help from the competent. Our program will give opportunity to users for applying tests by themselves. We are not expecting to diagnose individuals for dementia. It is the undertaking for the experts. Pre-screening with the test for dementia is our ultimate goal for the program.
- To provide a report that will have an information about the patient’s test result which is calculated by the program. This is crucial when we consider most of the cases the symptoms appear after age 65.
- To provide doctors an early information about the patient.
- To provide ease of use so that anyone can apply the tests for themselves.
- To provide an opportunity for everyone to have an idea whether an individual who takes the test might have a dementia.
Case 1: A user who realizes that his/her grandparents have forgotten some things and can not handle their affairs and suspects of dementia. Users can download the application and apply the test to check their grandparents’ mental status.
Case 2: A user who realizes that have forgotten vital activities very often soon, starts to research about his/her situation on the internet. He becomes aware of the existence of our program. He downloads, installs and uses the program. The program gives him a report which contains his test result. He goes to an expert on the subject in the direction of his report.
Case 3: When the results of the Mini-Mental State Examination applied by this program are seen by a doctor, a situation that helps the doctors to decide.
Case 4: A user on the internet may want to know what kind of test is applied to a possible dementia patient. While surfing on the internet that person may run into our program and apply the test to himself/herself even though the person might not suffer dementia.
Case 5: A software developer may be wondering about JAVA Swing application. Since our application includes radio buttons and so on, it might be a good way to understand and improve the skills of his/her Java programming knowledge. So that, in order to check or comprehend the architecture of our application the person may apply the test. In addition to that, image processing and speech recognition structures can be viewed in our application.
Doctors have lots of patients who suffer from dementia. Their examinations already take time to process. Our application can be the first step of the process. Patients can bring their test results to their doctors for preliminary information.
Patients Recent or former dementia patients can use our project to keep track of their disease. System is going to give them a chance to challenge their memory with the tests. Hence, doctor visits can be reduced if they can see their progress in any time. We had conversations with two patients about the project. Both have dementia but different kinds. They support the idea for developing such a project. Because of their immobility, both found it very useful. Old patients can run the system with the help of their relatives and friends.
Users Without differentiation, everyone can apply our project. Since it does not diagnose even to get an information about the tests, our project is practicable for everybody. The users of this project can be any person. Anyone who would like to see what dementia tests look like, a person who thinks that he/she might have dementia or it can even be a person who surfs on the internet.
Software Developers can use our project as an example of image processing algorithms. Speech recognition usage also can be viewed. Furthermore, our project is a personal application about health, hence it can lead to new life-facilitating health applications.
Our software is going to be an installable desktop application. The project is going to have;
- A user interface to make the interaction easier to communicate between user and the system.
- It is going to have the capacity to utilized by the people individually. This might be a patient, a relative of the patient or it might even be a healthy person who would like to take the test.
- The system itself is going to be not usable directly by the doctors. A report is going to be generated accordingly after an individual takes the test.
- Our dementia tests is going to be Mini-Mental State Examination test and clock-drawing test. Both tests are the most used tests for diagnosing dementia (Güngen et Al., 2002). Generally, they are applied consecutively.