A new approach to identify visual sensitivity in pneumonia patients in the emergency department at a 24-hour period: Digital pareidolia test.

BACKGROUND

Emergency departments (ED) serve as critical access points for individuals requiring urgent medical interventions, such as those with pneumonia. Notably, a substantial proportion of patients presenting to these facilities demonstrate cognitive deficits, encompassing both transient confusion and enduring cognitive disorders. The predisposition of the brain to make ambiguous stimuli meaningful is called pareidolia. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of the application of patients in the visual perception of ED patients with pneumonia at different times of the day: morning (MO: 07.00-08.00), midday (MD: 12.00-13.00), and midnight (MN: 00.00-01.00), using the digital pareidolia test (PT).

METHODS

The study included 99 adult patients with pneumonia classified as having yellow or green triage levels who experienced a post-treatment waiting period of at least 5 hours within the emergency department. The digital PT had 15 images of an equal number of faces, face pareidolia, and scramble images.

RESULTS

The accuracy rates of perceiving faces in face pareidolia images were in the MO, MD, and MN groups. We found that the MO group perceived faces for longer than the MD and MN groups in the pareidolia images. There was a statistically significant difference in the reaction times for face images between the MO and MN groups (P = .021).

CONCLUSION

The results showed that pneumonia patients' highest visual sensitivity was at midday and the lowest was in the morning. Digital neurocognitive tests, such as digital PT, can effectively identify significant cognitive issues such as visual sensitivity in the ED setting. The unique contribution of our research is its feasibility in fast-paced ED.