Serious Play: Tablet-based Video Games May Help People With Mild Cognitive Impairment
Serious Play: Tablet-based Video Games May Help People With Mild Cognitive Impairment
Serious Play: Tablet-based Video Games May Help People With Mild Cognitive Impairment
By Patty Shillington
April 22, 2021
Summary
A University of Massachusetts Amherst biomedical informatician will use a $436,836 grant from the National Institutes of Health to explore the use of "Serious games" played independently on computer tablets to improve brain function in older people with mild cognitive impairment.
Neuro-World, a collection of six games developed by Lee's industrial partner in South Korea, Woorisoft, is designed to stimulate working, or short-term, memory and selective attention.
"There aren't many solutions to stimulate cognitive ability in people with cognitive disabilities, especially in their homes, outside clinical settings," says Lee, whose research focuses on designing and implementing mobile-health technologies that address the practical needs of people with motor or cognitive impairments.
The goals of therapeutic treatments for MCI are to slow down the progression of the disease and lessen the impact of symptoms, preferably with non-pharmacological interventions like serious games because they are low cost, noninvasive, safe and without adverse side effects.
Lee's work addresses a key challenge of serious games in healthcare - developing a system that doesn't require substantial involvement of trained caregivers and clinicians to oversee and motivate patients to follow the game protocol.
In a small, pilot study with stroke survivors to validate the efficacy of the system, Lee, Jung and colleagues found that Neuro-World games were capable not only of improving patients' cognitive function but predicting the expected improvement, based on an analysis of their game performance.
"We hope that knowing playing games can improve their cognitive function can further motivate patients to play more games," Lee says.
Using the NIH funding, researchers at UMass Amherst, University of Montreal and Rutgers will conduct a study with 50 people diagnosed with MCI. Half will be asked to play the video games for 30 minutes twice a week for 12 weeks.
In addition to evaluating the ability of game-playing to improve cognitive function, researchers also aim to develop machine learning-based algorithms to predict cognitive function from the game performance.
"We thought people with MCI would be the population that could really benefit from serious games - before they move into a more serious condition like dementia or Alzheimer's," Lee says.
Reference
Shillington, P. (2021, April 22). Serious play: Tablet-based video games may help people with mild cognitive impairment. Retrieved July 29, 2021, from https://www.umass.edu/news/article/serious-play-tablet-based-video-games-may