You love your retirement-age parents. You want what's best for them. But let me ask you this: Do you know where your parents are right now? We live in a scary world, and today's parents require constant supervision. When it comes to the safety of your aging mom and dad, you can never be too vigilant.

Pets can accurately judge the passage of time and know when their owners are late to feed them, a new study reveals. Newly found brain cells'turn on like a clock' when your pet is waiting for dinner to work out how much time has passed. Scientists said the discovery provides fresh hope in the battle against Alzheimer's, a disease that hampers memory and navigation. It is believed these skills are closely linked with the neurons found by the team, and analysing these cells in Alzheimer's patients could shed new light on the disease. Newly found brain cells'turn on like a clock' when your pet is waiting for dinner to work out how much time has passed (stock image) In the experiment researchers focused on the medial entorhinal cortex.

It captures and analyzes high-precision information about both outcome and process, opening up the possibility of detecting subtle cognitive impairment even when test results appear superficially normal. We describe the design and development of the test, document the role of AI in its capabilities, and report on its use over the past seven years. We outline its potential implications for earlier detection and treatment of neurological disorders. We set the work in the larger context of the THink project, which is exploring multiple approaches to determining cognitive status through the detection and analysis of subtle behaviors. Neurocognitive testing is the overall term for the efforts to assess the performance of our mental capabilities, including for example, memory, attention, problem solving, language and verbal fluency, cognitive processing speed, and others.

Property taxes were coming due, and Erik Lingren was looking to make extra money. He cleaned out his Toyota Tacoma pickup last week, expecting to earn a couple hundred dollars by driving people around the city for the ride-sharing service Uber. Then he heard Uber's intentions to put self-driving cars on the road in Pittsburgh in the next few weeks. Lingren went from feeling like a part of the 21st-century sharing economy to a relic of an era whose time was speeding to an end. "I have to admit, it did kind of take me aback," said Lingren, 48, of Shaler.

The digital clock drawing test is a fielded application that provides a major advance over existing neuropsychological testing technology. It captures and analyzes high precision information about both outcome and process, opening up the possibility of detecting subtle cognitive impairment even when test results appear superficially normal. We describe the design and development of the test, document the role of AI in its capabilities, and report on its use over the past seven years. We outline its potential implications for earlier detection and treatment of neurological disorders. We set the work in the larger context of the THink project, which is exploring multiple approaches to determining cognitive status through the detection and analysis of subtle behaviors.

Reasoning by the usage of mental images has been the subject of much debate in Cognitive Science, especially among the schools of depictive and descriptive imagistic representations. Whether or not reasoning with mental images involves a mechanism or a process different from language based reasoning is an important question. This paper proposes that any theory which aims for a cohesive whole needs to be constrained by neurophysiological data and such data can be obtained by the Clock Drawing Test. The Clock Drawing Test (CDT) is a screening tool for cognitive impairment and can be used as a tool to test resilience of certain factors of visual spatial representations. Thus, it can help to form an empirical case for which factors are prone to debility and which factors are not during the onset and progress of cognitive impairment from a mental representation point of view. This paper presents 50 CDT tests done on patients with cognitive impairment and analyses the results which support the case for a depictive rather than a descriptive theory for imagistic representations. Lastly, this paper proposes that there is some evidence for a more dynamic and distributed nature of representation in the observations which question the above dichotomy and can be partly explained by certain aspects of the connectionist school of thought.

Early detection of cognitive impairment can prevent or delay the progress of cognitive dysfunction. In the field of neurology, the Clock Drawing Test (CDT) is one of the most popular instruments for detecting cognitive impairment. This paper presents the development of the ClockReader system, a computerized Clock Drawing Test. The main function of the system is to automate error handling in handwriting recognition. Since the ClockReader is a screening tool for dementia, it is not desirable to ask the users to fix their input errors in the drawing of either numbers or characters. Therefore, we propose a simple machine learning technique, context-bounded refinement filter algorithm. With trial experiments, we prove that this simple algorithm improves the recognizer accuracy of handwriting in clock drawings up to 88%.

Artificial Intelligence 51, pp. 417-71