Analysis of eye movement during reading in patients with different levels of cognitive decline

Abstract

With the aging of the population, the number of people suffering from dementia is on the rise. This represents an ever-growing problem for the society as the close relatives and caretakers of patients with dementia share the burden of the disease. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a state of cognitive decline between normal aging and dementia. Recent studies estimate that between 10% and 15% of patients with MCI progress to dementia within a year. There are indications that the progression of the disease can often be slowed down during the early stage of the cognitive decline. Therefore, the early detection of the cognitive decline is highly desirable. Eye movement during reading has been shown to be a promising biomarker of MCI. In this study, we analysed the eye movement of 115 participants during reading. The participants were grouped into four levels of cognitive decline; from healthy control to patients with dementia. Their eye movements were recorded with an eye-tracker and these recordings were described with our proposed set of descriptive attributes. The distributions of the attribute values were shown to be significantly different between various levels of cognitive decline.