Digital Gameplay as Cognitive Testing: How Everyday Interactions Could Unlock Insights Into Brain Health
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For most people, video games are a form of entertainment. For Rhoda Au, Ph.D., professor at Boston University, video games represent something far more profound: a potential window into the human brain.
Dr. Rhoda Au joined John Harrison, Ph.D., principal consultant at Metis Cognition Ltd. and associate professor at the Alzheimer Center at VUmc, for the Pearson-sponsored podcast series “The Progress Profile: Alzheimer’s Research in Focus,” to share insights into her research.
“Cognition is something that’s highly variable; it’s actually variable from moment to moment across the day,” she says. “Now we have all these digital devices [that] contain these different sensors that can act as data-collection tools.”
Digital devices such as smartphones, smartwatches, and wearable devices constantly gather data about how we move, speak, and interact, which could provide meaningful insights into brain health. Au suggests that these emerging digital measures could expand upon traditional approaches by enabling continuous assessment of cognition.
Pearson recently launched Revibe, a wearable device and app that delivers personalized vibration and text reminders to improve focus and attention. The continuous behavioral monitoring provides actionable insights for decision-making, tracking progress, and tailoring interventions.
“[Wearable devices] are able to actually collect our natural behavior as we move through our environment on a day-to-day basis,” she explains. “There is this possibility of harnessing the power of all these digital sensors … to help us start to think about how we measure cognition and how we can do it far more accurately and continuously than we have been doing.”
Unexpected Uses, Unexpected Insights
The idea that everyday technology can provide useful health data isn’t new, but its implications are still unfolding.
During a pre-COVID-19 visit to China, Au attended a health-innovation event showcasing new digital health tools. One startup created a wearable device to track older adults with AD to ensure they weren’t wandering away from home. The device served a clear clinical purpose — but that wasn’t the reason older adults were willing to wear it.
“It turns out that the reason the person was wearing it had nothing to do with allowing people to track them down,” she says. “It was because it had a radio feature; they would wear it because they wanted to listen to the news and music.”
That experience, she explains, underscores how digital tools can carry different meanings for different users. To gather digital information that measures cognition, it must provide value to users, caregivers, and researchers.
With the right data infrastructure and privacy safeguards, Au believes, data from digital devices could help researchers and clinicians better understand population-level risk and disease emergence, especially when combined with advances in biomarker science.
Pairing Digital and Biological Biomarkers
“I also think that moving forward, we’ll start to combine the expanding insights from blood-based biomarkers with this digital component,” Au says. “If you pair the two together, you’re talking about methods that can be applied on a global scale.”
Blood-based biomarkers and neuropsychological instruments are already used in the diagnosis and treatment of AD. Adding that information to digital data gathered from real-world behavioral information could help fill in the gaps and improve screening tools. Combining these data streams could make AD research and clinical trials more inclusive and representative.
“Together (these are) going to overcome a lot of the different biases that we’ve had in research, clinical trials, and care to date because we’re going to be able to do this in a much more inclusive manner than we have,” Au says.
Au cautions that innovation must be matched with rigor.
“I worry a lot about what we’re doing on the back-end side of this to make sure that we do the careful work that we’ve done around plasma biomarkers,” she adds. “We’ve done a lot of investment and work in validating the potential of blood-based biomarkers … and we need to think about that same careful approach when we come to digital.”
If researchers can validate, standardize, and ethically integrate digital data alongside biological markers, Au believes, the impact could be transformative.
“If we do that and bring it together,” she says, “I think we will be upending how we think about our research, care, and [clinical] trials.”
Tune in to Episode 4 of “The Progress Profile,” where Au shares more compelling insights about Alzheimer’s and brain health.