MONITORING "LONG-COVID" IMPACT ON COGNITION VIA DIGITAL NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT

The persistence of the COVID-19 disease symptoms, such as extreme fatigue, shortness of breath, cardiovascular
complications, depression and anxiety, pain, brain fog, loss of taste/smell, headaches as well as loss of memory has been evoked in many studies. This project aims at approaching the persistent symptomatology on cognition, more than 1 year after the infection. When we refer to cognition, we refer to everything associated with knowledge, that is, the accumulation of information we have acquired through learning or from our experience. We can define cognitive processes as the processes we use to incorporate new knowledge and make decisions based on it. Through these processes several cognitive functions intervene: perception, attention, memory, reasoning, language, learning, decision-making. All of these cognitive functions work together to integrate knowledge as a whole and create an interpretation of the world around us. Usually neuropsychological tests are used to evaluate cognitive problems, they consist in different exercises sometimes with words, figures to draw, images to remember, movement to repeat, numbers to link together etc.
The DigiCog project here propose 1) to test and validate a very novel device, which uses the eyes movement during tasks to evaluate very quickly the cognitive functioning; 2) to study potential cognitive problems long-term after COVID-19 and 3) to explore how cognition could be preserved.
Finally, this project will also help to bring the innovative device tested to the market, for accurately monitoring people with long COVID.