Study says touch-tone phone systems could be used to help detect callers’ dementia

Automated touch-tone phone answering systems could help screen older callers for early signs of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, researchers say.

In a study of 155 patients, a touch-tone system identified warning signs in 80 percent of patients who had been diagnosed with mental impairments by their doctors. It also gave passing grades to 80 percent of patients diagnosed as normal.

The results appear in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine.

Participants were given recorded instructions such as “Spell ‘fun’ on the touch-tone pad,” and “Press ‘1’ if the following sentence makes sense: ‘We wanted to cut down the tree in the yard so we went to the garage to get a hammer,”‘ said psychologist James Mundt, a research scientist at Healthcare Technology Systems Inc. in Madison, Wis., and lead author of the study. SF Chronicle