This Virtual Board Game Could Help Your Grandpa Remember to Take His Pills

Some senior adults might be physically able to take care of themselves, but they can't stay independent because they forget to take their medicine, and carry out other necessary daily tasks.

However, an international team of scientists, led by the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences in Toronto, has released a study that suggests it can help people lead independent lives longer by playing a board game.

In the study, scientists developed a digital board game called Virtual Week, in which players simulate going through the course of a day on a Monopoly-like circuit. Players roll a die to move forward and must simulate performing everyday tasks such as remembering to turn off the oven after cooking dinner and getting the mail by selecting them from a "perform task" button at the appropriate time.

Fifty-nine adults aged 60 to 79 played Virtual Week over a one-month period. They were tested before and after on their prospective memory, meaning their ability to plan and remember to perform an action later. Test subjects who played Virtual Week correctly performed more than double the number of prospective memory tasks compared to control groups that received music-based cognitive training or no training.

Brain imaging (EEG) on some of the adults who played Virtual Week also showed neuroplasticity, meaning brain changes that indicated improved memory performance, specifically in the ability to switch from an ongoing task to another at the right time.

As we've previously reported, the benefit of so-called "brain-training games" like Lumosity is overstated. Last year, a group of 70 brain researchers said there's no compelling scientific evidence that brain games reduce or reverse cognitive decline.

Nathan Rose, lead investigator of the study and research fellow at the School of Psychology at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, told Motherboard in an email he shares that skepticism about brain-training games. The difference he said, is that Virtual Week's "train to transfer" approach focuses on simulating specific, real-world memory tasks, which preliminary results from the study show helped subjects with daily prospective memory tasks. This as opposed to traditional brain-training games, where a series of puzzles and math problem aim to improve your overall cognitive abilities.

"We designed the Virtual Week training program to train for the transfer that people seek—that is, transfer to improvements in real-world performance," Rose said. "Encouragingly, we found that the Virtual Week training participants learned how to perform real world prospective memory tasks and instrumental activities of daily living more efficiently and effectively than participants in either active (music lessons) or no-contact control groups."

Rose said that as the world's population ages, it's becoming increasingly important to develop ways to support successful prospective memory functioning so that older adults can continue to live independently at home without the need for assisted care. For this reason, Rose and his colleagues recently received funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Catholic University to conduct larger, more rigorous randomized controlled trials that follow up on this preliminary study.