Standardized Touchscreen Assessment of Cognition (STAC)

The STAC is a cognitive screen the person takes themselves on an iPad. The app gives the instructions, times the timed subtests, records the responses, and produces a report — so the same test runs the same way whoever is in the room.

Subtests cover the ground a familiar cognitive screen would: orientation, attention, visual and auditory memory, generative naming by category and by first letter, and other language tasks. Alongside the numbers, the report captures qualitative information a paper form loses — how long each timed subtest actually took, the pattern of responses, and whether the person could follow the instructions without help.

• Validation Study

Licensing Notes: Sold through the App Store; the unlimited-use version includes unlimited assessments and reports. Reproduction requires developer permission. Source: http://www.cognitive-innovations.com/stac.html

Learn More: The validation evidence is limited and worth stating plainly. One published study (Wallace et al., 2017) compared the STAC against the Cognitive Linguistic Quick Test and the Cognitive Assessment of Minnesota in 88 neurotypical adults. It found moderate correlations in generative naming and immediate visual memory only, with no consistent pattern across age groups, and concluded that further testing is needed to establish clinical utility and validity in populations with cognitive impairment.

That study also found people comfortable with an iPad performed significantly better on generative naming and auditory working memory than those who were not — a confound worth knowing about in exactly the older-adult population the STAC is most likely to be used with. A related app, the F-STAC, presents 14 functional tasks with built-in real-life distractions such as text messages and background noise.