A Computational Approach to Assess Working Memory in Individuals with Aphasia

Aphasia is a disorder related to deficits in language expression and comprehension. requiring continuous efforts for treatment and rehabilitation. The most used methods to evaluate the progress of an aphasic patient require much time to be applied and interpreted and few of them are available in Portuguese. This paper describes a new method to assess the working memory usage of aphasic individuals based on a biomarker associated with the severity of the disorder. The study deals with the process of estimating a working memory score based on the Neupsilin neuropsychological test and the analysis of electroencephalographic signals collected while the user performs an n-back task. The study was applied to 14 volunteers, divided into two groups, one with aphasia and the other one without aphasia. As expected, the analysis of the n-back task showed a lower performance in aphasic individuals. The results also indicate that the Neupsilin test can be used to separate the two classes of individuals, with an average accuracy of 78.57 %, using three subtests related to the working memory. The scores can be used to build a statistical model to estimate the working memory usage based on the collected electroencephalographic signals.