PICSSi: Hacking Cognitive Health

PICSSi:- Personalized Intelligent Cognitive Screening System

gamifying user memories and experiences into personalized enriched visual stimuli

Shifting the Paradigm

The PICSSi approach recognizes a fundamental truth - we are not all the same. Each of us is unique in how we think, how we problem solve, in our memories and life experiences. PICSSi leverages our differences to develop an integrated, personalized approach to tracking changes in your cognition over time. This approach is consistent with the high degree of variability and considerable overlap in the signs and symptoms across a wide range of conditions. Rather than looking at domain-specific deficits, PICSSi focuses on tracking nuanced individual changes in a person's overall cognitive profile across all cognitive domains.

Cognitive Gestalt

At conflu3nce, we view cognition from a Gestalt perspective - that the intergrated whole (cognition) is something other than - more than - the sum of its parts (domain-specific tests and deficits). PICSSi's enriched visual stimuli holistically engage cognition, making it possible to directly measure global cognition - skills and processes across all domains.

Why Now?

Traditional neurocognitive testing is domain specific - a diagnostically-driven approach that focuses on identifying deficits in specific domains: memory, attention, executive function, language, visual-spatial, or sensory-motor. Because of significant overlapping, and at times mixed, symptomology across a wide range of conditions arriving at a differential diagnosis and/or making a "rule-out" diagnosis based on deficits is challenging. Domain-specific deficits tests have detection sensitivity limits, requiring a patchwork of domain-specific tests that operate across multiple discontinuous clinical scales. Perhaps, most importantly overall cognition is not directly measured but is rather derived as the sum of individual domain testing scores.

The Missing Pieces

Missing from the cognitive health equation are tools which can be personalized to each of us and still be sensitive enough to detect nuanced changes in cognitive health in people across a wide range of ages and conditions. Ideally, these tools should be able to detect changes in your cognitive health, but still be used on a population-level scale to support the development of predictive biomarkers. For early detection of subtle changes, we're focused on changes in cognition and how everything works together, not just how the parts work or when they don't!

Benchmarking
Cognitive Health Today

Detecting
Changes in the Future

Looking Across the Cognitive Health Spectrum

PICSSi's multi-modal, multi-domain has the capacity
to impact the lives of people across the cognitive spectrum

Key PICSSi Applications

• TAKE^5! ReSet-A - Minimally disruptive, on-demand solution to help reset attention and focus with applications for both children and adults with ADHD and other attention and executive function challenges in school and work environments.

• PICSSi Prime - Personalized assessments for tracking changes over time and interventional solutions to help stem the tide of cognitive decline in older adults, and for people across the cognitive spectrum.

• PICSSi 360° - Multi-modal, multi-domain cognitive engagement tool (view-only to hands-on options) to meet dynamic recovery needs for patients following Stroke/TBI.

• PICSSi Pro - Proactive Progression Monitoring. Designed to monitor and track cognitive health status changes over time for building Cognitive Profiles (point-in-time) and Cognitive Signatures (changes over-time) towards improving early detection and predictive analytics for detecting subtle changes associated with disease/condition progression and drug safety monitoring.

• periCOG - Perioperative Risk Management Screening tool to identify patients at-risk for post-operative cognitive issues and to support long-term tracking of changes in cognitive health status.

TAKE^5! ReSet-A
Case Study

Using Enriched Stimuli to RESET Attention

Students w/ADHD: Student #1 || Student #2

A Gestalt Perspective on Images - the PICSS Platform Story

multi-stable image set

stable image set

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words - all the more so a composite of two or more content-rich images. The figure-ground image sets are generated by serially juxtaposing sections from multiple pictures - a logical puzzle that embeds multiple Gestalt principles (figure-ground, symmetry, closure, similarity).

Each figure-ground image set portrays the illusion of depth and while all image combinations convey this attribute, a function related in part to differences in brightness, not all image combinations behave the same. These image sets are a type of ambiguous image portraying dynamic figure-ground properties. Below are several popular examples of binary, bi-stable ambiguous images. (1)

Depending on the image combinations, different image sets are perceived as being stable or are categorized as bi-/multi-stable percepts. The "stability" refers to whether or not an image set is perceived to exist in more than one figure/ground state. If it does, then the viewer perceives a switch occurring between which image occupies the ground position at any one point in time.

In addition to identifying key attributes, image features, that could be used to predict whether an image combination is stable or multi-stable, what became evident is that image parts interact with another within an image and between images, impacting our perception and understanding of image scenes. These properties, together with hierarchical relationships can be exploited to better evolve image/scene properties, hone visual attention, personalize cognitive assessments, and understand extractable features for both AI and human cognition.

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