The validation study of our proprietary Brief Assessment of Cognition (BAC App) is now in press in Schizophrenia Research, available as Open Access PDF.

To facilitate the administration of our widely-used pen-and-paper neurocognitive battery, the Brief Assessment of Cognition (BAC), we developed a regulatory compliant iPad-based application, the BAC App. The purpose of the BAC App is to reduce administration burden on site raters by automating and standardizing the testing procedures and scoring, while maintaining the importance of the rater-patient interaction.

Ensuring full understanding of the task at hand, motivation to try their best, and providing general encouragement to complete the testing is critical to obtaining meaningful data in impaired or behaviorally-challenging patient populations such as Alzheimer’s Disease, depression, ADHD and schizophrenia. Audio recording also allows independent scoring and data quality checks, and provides insight into the testing session.

The validation study compared performance and psychometric characteristics of the BAC App with the original pen-and-paper BAC in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls recruited from 3 US sites. The study confirms the equivalence of the mode of administration between the pen-and-paper BAC and BAC App for all subtests, except the Token Motor Test due to the expected qualitative differences in task demands.

Most importantly, the applicability of the established normative data is confirmed. The study showed that iPad-assisted rater administration using the BAC App is a viable option to reduce site burden while maintaining the validity of the neurocognitive outcomes. The BAC App is now being implemented in industry-sponsored clinical trials.

 

View or download a PDF.

View the publication at Schizophrenia Research.