The Groundskeeper Gaming Platform as a Diagnostic Tool for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Sensitivity, Specificity, and Relation to Other Measures.
The purpose of this study was to assess the relative accuracies of the Conners' Brief Rating Scale, Parent Version, the Conners' Continuous Performance Test II (CPT II), and a novel interactive game called "Groundskeeper" to discriminate child psychiatric patients with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).



We administered the three assessments to 113 clinically referred ADHD and non-ADHD patients who had been diagnosed with the Kiddie-Schedule of Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia- Present and Lifetime (K-SADS-PL), Version 19.



As measured by the area under the curve (AUC) statistic from receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, the diagnostic accuracy of Groundskeeper (0.79) was as high as the accuracy of the Conners' parent rating of inattention (0.76) and better than the CPT II percent correct (0.62). Combining the three tests produced an AUC of 0.87. Correlations among the three measures were small and, mostly, not significant.



Our finding of similar diagnostic accuracies between Groundskeeper and the Conners' inattention scale is especially remarkable given that the Conners' inattention scale shares method variance with the diagnostic process. Although our work is preliminary, it suggests that computer games may be useful in the diagnostic process. This provides an important direction for research, given the objectivity of such measures and the fact that computer games are well tolerated by youth.
1 Departments of Psychiatry and of Neuroscience and Physiology, SUNY Upstate Medical University , Syracuse, New York.|2 K.G. Jebsen Center for Research on Neuropsychiatric Disorders, Department of Biomedicine, University of Bergen , Bergen, Norway .
Stephen V
SV
Faraone
3 Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai , New York, New York.
Jeffrey H
JH
Newcorn
4 Department of Psychology, Syracuse University , Syracuse, New York.
Kevin M
KM
Antshel
5 Department of Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, New York University Langone School of Medicine , New York, New York.
Lenard
L
Adler
6 CogCubed , Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Kurt
K
Roots
6 CogCubed , Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Monika
M
Heller
D000293:Adolescent; D001289:Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D015331:Cohort Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D012372:ROC Curve; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D018910:Video Games
ADHD; biomarker; decision-making; diagnosis; gaming