Name: How Video Games Could Help Treat Brain Disorders
Uploaded: 2016-11-02
Duration: 11 min 43 s
Description: Including ADHD, autism, and depression

I have to say you know it's interesting I think that there's a little bit of a wrap that video games get sometimes. I mean if anything the thought is maybe they actually will cause some of these disorders right. Maybe they'll lead more to ADHD or lead more to Being distracted, or being having difficulty multitasking, but you think differently. I mean, I think that, that is all possible. Right? I mean, with good there comes bad. It's just how nature works. But because those things can lead to negative effects we have to flip it around and say they are strong behavioral influence or maybe we could do good with them. What we're gonna show you know is a game, That I first designed eight years ago as a research study at UCFS. And we built this game called New Racer where you drive a car and respond to signs. It was a multitasking game. And I had the hypothesis that if you challenged the brain on multitasking, cuz it's something that we don't do very well, you can see improvements in other aspects of what we call cognitive control, attention and working memory. And so we did a big study over several years showing that we could take healthy older adults and improve not just their performance on the game in terms of multitasking, but other abilities that we tested using different measures, attention and memory. And then we formed the company Achilles, which licensed the technology from UCSF, and they've worked for years to build this game that you're gonna see now. Which uses the same engine, the adaptive challenge in multi- tasking, but it's a way better game. And Achille has the goal of taking this all the way into the world of medicine, maybe tech medicine. Is an interesting term, and the idea that we can run this game through the same type of clinical trial that we would do for a drug or device is really interesting. The FDA is very excited about this. We actually launch with this particular game a full multi site FDA approval trial for this to be a therapeutic treatment for children with ADHD. We also have trials in PTSD and traumatic brain injury, depression, early Alzheimer's disease. Both diagnostically and therapeutically. So you're gonna take a look at this game, this game is actually in testing right now. You'll see Sanje playing it you'll see the same elements of multi tasking challenge that I described to you in neuro racer but in a way better interface and on a higher level game. So Sanje's gonna try to do two tasks at the same time. I'm the healthy older adult trial for this yes thank you. And the idea is that if you challenge yourself in this way over time you can see benefits in other aspects of attention, and can this help kids with ADHD and adults with Alzheimer's so One. Before I play this, let me just ask you, cuz I think I had mind that a lot of people read recently, revolved around Lumostiy, and that sort of brain training. You've mentioned this already but the idea of clinical trials, what happened do you think, with something like Lumosity and how is this different? There's two big differences, or big issues that we're all struggling with is academics, and also on the industry side. The first is, I believe that if you are going to change the brand, even though it's plastic, it still has this homeostasis, this stability. So you have to really be immersed and engaged, just like if you were in a physical fitness program. So the first is that you have to build and develop really high- end interactive experiences, and that's why we work with professionals in the video game industry. The second part is, you have to actually show it works. Just because a brand's a plastic doesn't mean that every challenge you're gonna do is gonna have a meaningful and a sustainable impact on you. And so we are in, this game is not available, you can't buy, you can't download it in the store, in the app store. It is in clinical trial. And if it doesn't work, we'll reformulate and try it again, just like The pharmaceutical industry showed us. So we need to have a high level development and high level validation, if we're gonna move something from the entertainment to man, into the world of medicine, and even education. And purposes of this conference, can you give us any insights into what Some of the early results have been, are you in a process of validating or still confirm. Yeah, the pilot data on ADHD was incredibly exciting, we're hitting end points similar to what you see in drug trials, so that's what encouraged us to apply Apply to the FDA and start that trial. We also have positive data in depression, in early studies in traumatic brain injury, as well as in Alzheimer's disease, as a diagnostic tool to use the sensitivity of the game to pick up early indicators of cognitive decline. So this would involve, if I was somebody who was prescribed this, and by the way, we can't show them the screen right now, is that right ?. Yes, the audience will be able to see. See us playing, but you can't see the screen because it's still Yeah. Yeah. Well I think we're gonna show the audience in the live streaming, but so don't be able to see if plan. So if you doctor prescribe this to me I would have this on mind. Eye pattern something like this? Yeah. The idea is this could be a prescription said of the doctor playing out prescription pattern all ready writing down drugs. The idea would be that you could prescribe like 6 weeks of iPad playing and be able to monitor that remote. So I'm gonna go ahead and start going through this I think. Let's go ahead, I'm gonna ahead and start playing here in a second, if I can get this work. Should I go? Yep, let's bring it up. All right. There we go. Go ahead and we can, all right play. This is what it looks like. Maybe you can talk though what I'm. Okay, so the same idea that was. Yeah, it'll start and then this is where you have to pay attention to what the challenge is. So there's two challenges here, Sonja is gonna be navigating using the accelerometer on the stream and trying to go over these power tabs, you'll see that, but he also has to respond rapidly and accurately only to the green monster and not the others. So this is the game that's in the ADHD trial. So you could see He has, it takes a lot of attention to navigate then he's responding successfully. Got three in a row there. So he didn't, he held the response there. Now what's happening is both of those task are independently adaptive. So you could see as he goes faster, as he gets better it goes faster the fish and come up more rapidly. And he is trying to earn these stars. And what the game algorithm is doing is trying to drive him to multitask in this moment, because we have shown in other experiments that this is what leads to the improvement outside of the game. If we had this same game in single task mode we show that, that doesn't lead to the improvement. The active ingredient in this game is pushing the brain in this way. You're doing really well you already have one star. I do okay and so what does that mean. That's really fast. Also the game is set to his ability of baseline so you get a diagnostic that puts it right in your comfortable space to play. And then over weeks of play constantly pushes you and the challenges that he's having go up and up so right now it's one target of the green fish but it could be a green bird, a green fish and not or a red Red this and yellow that. There's gonna be increasing challenges as the week go on, the navigation gets more complicated and as you build this start, you get, you know move into harder and difficult challenges. How good is the brain at multi tasking? Seriously as I am playing this game. We're not very good at it which is why we thought that training it would be a way to push the brain in something that it's just inherently not very good at. Actually just had a book that came out last week called the Distracted Mind where I discuss the challenges of multi- tasking in the real world. And this game is not to like teach you how to like, text and drive. That's not the goal here. [ LAUGH ] Disclaimer, right. That's not what we're trying to do. it's not even necessarily trying to teach you how to multitask better. It's trying to push your brain in a domain that it's generally challenged in because we have shown that this leads to benefit outside of the game play. So two stars now. Two stars, that's good, right? Yeah, you're good. If you talk about- No surgeon type of skill. If you talk about memory overall and I'm talking to you too. [ CROSSTALK ] Yeah, this is triple tasking now. That's right. It's pretty impressive. I can't talk when I play. It's I'm screwing up now as I'm talking to you. No, you are in star zone so if you keep going you might nail that. Yup, there's three. Now, you could see how much faster it is right now. Now you see snow coming down. It's constantly pushing him. This, when you talk about trying to decrease the risk of one developing Alzheimer's a study that came out that talked about [ LAUGH ] memory. It has it's multi tasking. Talk about reasoning. You're driving a car right now. You're seeing it real time Focusing on memory training, focusing on listening training, focusing on sped processing training if those three brought categories there is the one that's most important? Most of what we do put pressure is the speed of responding we think that that is an area that we have great adaptive abilities to really push this a very much a speed game But we have meditation inspired video games that are slow and we have physical fitness games. We're out of time so we're gonna move over. All right. It's pretty good game. [ LAUGH ] [ APPLAUSE ] You talk a lot about this idea of adapting. I'm playing a game but the game was changing in response to how I was playing which you take it even a step further than that. Yeah and we're gonna show you a demo of that. We have very short time we're actually trying to squeeze two demos in ten minutes. But here we go so we have this demo right here. So this is a technology from our group called the glass brain. This is actually my brain, the structure of my brain. It could be Sanchez's brain. So let's say he's been down to our lab before, we scan his brain on a 3D scanner, and you're looking at it here now. We could strip off the skin, this is why we call it the glass brain, and what we could do is I'm gonna show you some of this and bring on some activity across different domains. All right so what we're showing you here is the activity in my brain while I was playing a game. Now this is obviously pre recorded but if Sanje was wearing an EG cap now and this was the structure of his brain we could pull this up You could see that there and with the joystick just fly inside his brain in real time. We do this all the time in the lab. So now what we would be looking at and this is both an MRI image in static. That's the golden fibers that connect the different brain areas and the surface of the brain. But those colored lights are the different frequency patterns generated by electrical activity in real time. With a mobile EG cap. And so, we could think about the interesting future where we use this type of technology to do realtime diagnostics. So we're watching you challenge, we have a virtual reality version of this, so you could put on a VR cap, I can have on a VR cap on. I could be flying through your brain, while you're in your virtual world, pushing on different knobs to challenge you, and see how your brain responds But where we're pushing, and our efforts are at the moment, is to use this real- time brain data to guide the game challenge and adaptivity. So the game would not just be responding to how fast or accurate you are, it would actually be responding for how your brain was processing information. So if it sees a deficit for example in your visual processing stream, it would reward you as you engage better visually. And give you a greater challenge and push you in that domain. Someone else is playing the same game could be challenged differently depending on what's going on in that brand. It is amazing cuz you talk about the idea of chemicals, drugs being sort of a shotgun approach but digital medicine perhaps offering a much more personalized approach as well. We are gonna leave it on that image fro the people who are watching on their computers. Adam, always a pleasure, thank you very much. A warm round applause for Dr. Grzeslo. [ APPLAUDING ] [ MUSIC ]