9PM: A Novel Interactive 9-Peg Board for Cognitive and Physical Assessment

Cognitive assessments are a crucial part of rehabilitation in persons with a neurological disorder and vocational rehabilitation, where people need to be trained to improve their cognitive abilities. While human action involves using several cognitive skills and physical skills, most assessment systems focus on detecting or assessing either the cognitive ability or just physical ability. There is a need for a system that bridges the gap between real-world activity, which involves physical activity and cognition, and clinical tests that are tailored for a specific use. To address this need, we propose a novel interactive 9-Hole Pegboard called the 9-Peg Move (9PM) capable of performing both cognitive and physical assessments in the same system. The system incorporates wearable sensors to collect data for objective evaluation. Preliminary machine learning results indicate that the data collected using our system can reliably recognize cognitive factors like perceived mental effort, perceived task difficulty, and perceived interest in a task. These results are the first step toward building an automated immersive assessment system.