INTRODUCTION: The rising prevalence of dementia necessitates a scalable solution to cognitive screening and diagnosis. Digital cognitive assessments offer a solution but lack the extensive validation of older paper-based tests. Creating a digital cognitive assessment which recreates a paper-based assessment could have the strengths of both tests. METHODS: We developed the Autonomous Cognitive Examination (ACoE), a fully remote and automated digital cognitive assessment which recreates the assessments of paper-based tests. We assessed its ability to reproduce entire cognitive screens in a comparison cohort (n = 35), and the ability to reproduce overall diagnoses with an additional validation cohort (n = 11). RESULTS: The ACoE reproduced overall cognitive assessments with excellent agreement (intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.89) and reproduced overall diagnoses with excellent fidelity (area under the curve = 0.96). DISCUSSION: The ACoE may reliably reproduce the evaluations of the ACE-3, which may help in accessible evaluation of patient cognition. Assessment in larger population of patients with specific diseases will be necessary to determine usefulness.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

This study was funded by MITACS Accelerate

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