‘The Mind Guardian’ Enables Anyone to Perform a Quick Self-Assessment at Home
Samsung Spain announced this Tuesday in an event held in Madrid the launch of The Mind Guardian, an innovative AI-powered gamified application that offers a self-assessment memory test for large-scale screening of early signs of cognitive decline—a common symptom in the early stages of diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Behind this groundbreaking development is a team of researchers from the University of Vigo’s Telecommunications Technology Research Center, atlanTTic, led by professors Luis Anido and Manuel Fernández Iglesias. This milestone is the result of over a decade of multidisciplinary research, bringing together experts in technology, healthcare, and scientific research to advance the early detection of cognitive impairment.
This breakthrough represents a significant step forward in healthcare and applied technology, breaking barriers to facilitate the early diagnosis of dementia-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s, a disease affecting over 800,000 people in Spain alone.
VIGO, 260225. THE MIND GUARDIAN
Free, Accessible, and 97% Accurate
With a 97% accuracy rate, this video game is a self-administered, free, and accessible tool designed specifically for individuals over 55 years old without obvious symptoms of cognitive decline. Its most innovative aspect is the combination of three key scientific and technological elements: the gamification of conventional memory tests used in healthcare settings, AI-based analysis, and machine learning techniques, all while adhering to psychometric validity standards in the development of digitalized tests.
The primary goal of The Mind Guardian is to provide tangible support to individuals, their families, and caregivers, emphasizing early detection as a crucial factor in improving quality of life. Detecting cognitive decline early can lead to interventions that enhance quality of life by up to 10 years and reduce the impact of dementia by 40%.
A Research Project Over a Decade in the Making
The research project that led to the development of The Mind Guardian began in 2014, with the formation of a multidisciplinary team from the technological and healthcare fields at the Universities of Vigo and Santiago de Compostela. Their goal was to integrate gamification and AI techniques with psychometric validity criteria as a screening tool for cognitive decline.
As a result, the atlanTTic Telematic Systems Engineering Group developed a battery of six video games designed to assess different types of memory—episodic, executive, working, semantic, procedural—and attention. Each game was based on conventional tests commonly used in healthcare settings.
Pilot Testing in Day Centers and Associations
Between 2016 and 2023, various pilot tests were conducted in different day centers, senior citizen associations, and organizations involved in dementia care, such as the Galician Alzheimer’s Association (Afaga). The latest results, covering 152 users, confirmed the tool’s usability and acceptability, with cross-validation accuracy reaching 97%.
Through machine learning training and user evaluations, researchers identified that focusing on episodic, semantic, and procedural memory provided statistically significant results for classifying individuals as healthy, experiencing mild cognitive impairment, or having dementia.
Additionally, usability validation was conducted as part of a European project involving 150 additional participants from different countries, using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). This extensive research resulted in a PhD dissertation defended at the University of Vigo and several high-impact scientific publications.
University of Vigo Holds the Rights
In 2022, Samsung Iberia and the University of Vigo began exploring ways to offer these tests as a free mobile application for large-scale home-based screenings. This collaboration led to a formal agreement in 2024, securing The Mind Guardian’s development and distribution, with the University of Vigo retaining intellectual property rights.
The project also received clinical support from the Translational Neuroscience Group at the Galicia Sur Health Research Institute, as well as technical contributions from Cheil Spain (responsible for the application and user distribution) and Innatial Developers S.L., a Galician firm specializing in Android system integration.
Samsung played a crucial role as a technology partner, providing the necessary resources to scale the project from academic research to a fully developed application. The company placed special emphasis on user experience and intuitive design, ensuring that the app remains easy to use for its target audience in a self-managed environment.
“We focused on developing a set of ‘serious games’ for the early detection of cognitive decline, integrating gamification and AI techniques that have been extensively tested at the atlanTTic research center of the University of Vigo. Thanks to a multidisciplinary research team, we explored the combination of video games and machine learning to assess different types of memory and detect early signs of cognitive decline. Our work centered on integrating AI algorithms developed at atlanTTic into The Mind Guardian app, achieving an accuracy level of 97.1%, which demonstrates the enormous potential of technology for large-scale cognitive screening—something that is otherwise time-consuming and resource-intensive with traditional methods,” said Luis Anido, Professor of Telematic Engineering and an expert in health technology and AI at atlanTTic.
Fonte: Duvi, Faro de Vigo, El País, El Mundo