iPad 'brain training' game could help Schizophrenia patients improve memory, live a normal life

A new iPad game designed and developed by neuroscientists to provide brain-training could help improve the memory and ability of people with schizophrenia to do tasks normally, study found. Researchers said the game could help schizophrenia sufferers to get back to work or study after a diagnosis.

The study, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, shows patients who played the game regularly over four weeks were four times better than non-players at remembering and learning the kind of things that are critical for their normal life. The game, called Wizard, was designed on scientific principles to “train” the brain in episodic memory.

Schizophrenia is a mental health condition that causes serious lapses in episodic memory and a range of psychological symptoms, from behaviour changes to hallucinations and delusions. Many patients experience cognition problems that prevent them from returning to work or studying at university to work independently, according to the study.

The authors said anything that can improve the ability of the brain to remember everyday events will help them to lead a normal life. With this reason in mind, Sahakian stated that they have formulated “an iPad game that could drive the neural circuitry behind episodic memory by stimulating the ability to remember where things were on the screen.”

The Wizard helps people to remember events such as where they parked a car or placed a set of keys, lead author of the study and professor at the department of psychiatry at the Cambridge University, Barbara Sahakian said. The researchers have worked with game designers in nine-month collaboration to develop the new iPad brain-training app, which some patients helped in the game design to ensure they would understand it and enjoy it, Sahakian said.

The app on the idea of having to remember different locations of characters has a wizard theme with various levels of difficulty. The players were asked to enter rooms, find items in boxes and remember where they put them, which tests their episodic memory.

In the study, the patients who played the game made significantly fewer errors in tests afterwards on their memory and brain functioning, Sahakian stated, which shows an indication of the improvement of the memory and learning of the patient. She added the memory game provides benefits where drugs had so far failed and with no side-effects.

However, the main symptoms can be treated with anti-psychotic drugs, but there is no proven drug therapy for treating losses in episodic memory. The researchers designed and developed the computer-based game as way to train the brain of schizophrenic patients, Sahakian explained.

Although the results are promising, further studies are needed on larger groups of patients to confirm the current findings, but Professor Peter Jones of Cambridge University, who led the study, said the game “could help people with schizophrenia minimise the impact of their illness on everyday life.” Jones also suggests game apps have potentials to not only “improve a patient’s episodic memory, but also their functioning in activities of daily living.”

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