A new mobile application has been developed by clinicians in Plymouth, supported by international colleagues, that provides an easy-to-use dementia assessment tool that can be used by a wide range of medical and other healthcare staff.

A team of clinicians from Sydney, Australia and Plymouth, UK, have taken the paper-based Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination (ACE-III), one of the most popular and commonly-used screening tools for dementia and translated it into app form for more accurate assessment and wider use within the clinical team.

The ACEmobile will be available to download from iTunes and Google Play by June 2013. To find out more information and to register your interest then please visit www.acemobile.org.

The development of ACEmobile has been collaborated between Professor John Hodges (Neuroscience Research Australia), Dr Rupert Noad (Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust) and Dr Craig Newman (Plymouth University Peninsula Schools of Medicine and Dentistry). It has been supported by the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care in the South West Peninsula (PenCLAHRC).

Watch an interview with Dr Rupert Noad and Dr Craig Newman below.

Key features which support a high level of accuracy, convenience and automation will enable assessments in dementia clinics to be easily carried out by all members of the team. These include:

• embedded administration instructions which mean that the clinical team no longer need to refer to a manual. This makes it much easier to accurately and reliably deliver the assessment with patients.
• quick and automated reporting with one tap of a button the ACEmobile automatically scores and produces automated reports, making it easy for clinicians to obtain the information they need.
• routine collection of data, which will be valuable for individual clinical teams to be able to audit their own dementia assessment practice.

“ACE-III is a great assessment tool, but as with many such tools which are paper-based, it has been open to human error and miscalculation. By producing the ACEmobile app we have reduced the risk of such error and miscalculation and created a tool which can be used by the wider dementia care team.”

Dr. Rupert Noad, Consultant Neuropsychologist, Derriford Hospital, Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust