Performance of the SmartMe&You serious video games for home telemonitoring is related to cognitive status and resting-state electroencephalographic markers in healthy and Parkinson’s disease participants

Unsupervised serious video games on the SmartMe&You home telemonitoring platform may enable the assessment of cognitive fluctuations in older individuals, with or without cognitive deficits. Here, we tested their validity in cognitively unimpaired older adults (Healthy) and patients with mild cognitive impairment and mild to moderate dementia due to Parkinson’s disease (PDCD). Such validity was assessed using Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores and resting-state eyes-closed electroencephalography (rsEEG) activity. Clinical, demographic, and rsEEG datasets were collected from 34 healthy and 68 PDCD participants. The SmartMe&You video games included 7 unsupervised cognitive tasks implemented on a commercial tablet. The rsEEG source activities in the individual delta, theta, and alpha frequency bands were estimated using the eLORETA freeware. As novel findings, we showed that game performance: (1) discriminated between healthy participants and PDCD patients, with overall accuracy exceeding 90%; (2) was positively associated with MMSE scores across all participants (p < 0.00001); and (3) was negatively associated with global rsEEG source activity in the delta and theta frequency bands (p < 0.00001). These findings suggest that serious videogames of the SmartMe&You home telemonitoring platform were feasible and sensitive to cognitive status across the spectrum from normal aging to Parkinson’s disease-related dementia. This approach provides a scalable, low-cost, and ecologically valid tool for remote cognitive monitoring, with future potential applications in both early detection and longitudinal tracking of cognitive decline.