A team of clinicians from Australia and the UK have translated one of the most commonly used dementia screening tools into app form to speed up patient assessment.

The ACEmobile app uses the paper-based Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination (ACE-III) as its starting point and will be made available free of charge in forms for Apple and Android devices in the next couple of months.

Officially launched today at the Healthcare Innovation Expo 2013 in London, its developers say the app provides a sensitive, reliable, secure and easy-to-administer dementia assessment tool that can be used by a wide range of medical and other healthcare staff.

ACEmobile came out of a collaboration between senior clinicians from Neuroscience Research Australia, Derriford Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust and Plymouth University Peninsula Schools of Medicine and Dentistry.

One of the team, Derriford's Dr Rupert Noad, said: “ACE-III is a great assessment tool, but as with many such tools which are paper-based, it has been open to human error and miscalculation.

“By producing the ACEmobile app we have reduced the risk of such error and miscalculation and created a tool which can be used by the wider dementia care team. Dementia is applying increasing pressure on health care services around the world and is set to continue to do so – by creating a reliable, accurate and easy to use application of ACE-III, and making it free of charge, we hope that the future of the ACEmobile project can play a role in earlier and more accurate diagnoses.”

ACEmobile has been designed to ensure that the assessment is effortless to administer. The administration instructions are embedded within the app, which means that the clinical team no longer need to refer to a manual. This means it is much easier to accurately and reliably deliver the assessment with patients.

The ACEmobile team have the aspiration that the app will also be a valuable tool for research, resulting in the development of better normative data for different patient populations and ACE-III individual sub-test norms.

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