Estimating the Effect of Interactive Workshop on Cognitive Abilities of Elderly People Staying in Old Age Homes through Truncated Binomial Model

Abstract

Cognitive decline is prevalent in older adults and is associated with decline in performance of instrumental activities which adversely affects the wellbeing of older adults. The aim of this study is to build a model that would estimate the benefit from the score based 21 days’ workshop in terms of their cognitive abilities of old adults, suffering from mild cognitive disorders. A truncated binomial distribution with missing zero and one classes, having parameters (ni, p), ni known, is fitted to estimate the unknown parameter p, by the methods of maximum likelihood and simulation. The data was collected on 71 subjects residing in 5 old age homes in Delhi, India, using Mini Mental Status Examination tool before and after a score-based 21 days cognitive behaviour therapy workshop. The probability of benefiting from the workshop is estimated only for those test attempts which were more than ten percent completed. The maximum likelihood estimate and simulation estimate of p were 0.838552 and 0.835967 respectively. Our Zero One Truncated Binomial Distribution model computed the probability of benefit (more than or equal to 0.5) from the workshop and found that by using the estimated values of p from the methods of maximum likelihood estimation and simulation, out of 71 subjects 51 (71.83%) and 53 (74.65%) were benefitted respectively. Our study concluded that there are positive effects of psycho-social interventions on quality of life and mental health.