For seniors, a Wii may be a win-win: Fun and brain-nourishing
Lillian Dow of Folsom, using a Nintendo Wii device, engages in virtual bowling Wednesday at the Folsom Senior Center. Watching her are, from left, Doretta Youngdahl of Pacifica, Elsie Offner of Folsom and Tom Grunwaldt of Folsom.
A dozen or so older adults at the Folsom Senior Center erupt in cheers and clapping as Elsie Offner, a 91-year-old resident of Folsom, bowls a strike.
The senior center doesn’t have lanes, but it does have a new bit of gaming technology, a Nintendo Wii. And with it comes Wii bowling, by far the most popular video game with the seniors who frequent the community center.
“It gets you out of your rocking chair,” said Offner, when asked what she liked best about the game.
And these types of video games bring with them substantial social benefits.
“It allows them to gather socially and feel social without leaving the comfort of the senior lounge,” said Sandy Hilton, the senior center’s community services manager.
While playing video games promotes social connectedness and friendships, other benefits – such as the improvement and sharpening of the minds’ abilities – are still being uncovered.
Cognitive or mental decline is a hallmark of aging. Most of us, at some point or other, will begin to see our memory, attention or reasoning capabilities falter. Recent research from the University of Virginia suggests that such declines can begin as early as our late 20s to early 30s.
Video games are emerging as a powerful new stimulant for helping to buttress and buffer the mind against the march of time.
Research over the past decade has repeatedly shown that games and other brain exercises can be effective aliments to declines in cognitive functioning, including memory, attention, processing speed, problem solving and mental flexibility.
The ACTIVE study published by the American Medical Association in 2006 showed that benefits for older adults can be seen five years after cognitive training – including positive effects on daily functioning.
Researchers at North Carolina State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology are teaming up to take the next step in understanding games’ benefits to cognitive functioning.
Anne McLaughlin, a North Carolina State assistant professor, has been awarded a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to uncover the aspects of games that have the most potential to improve cognitive functioning in older adults.
“We want to produce guidelines for people making games,” McLaughlin said. “The goal is to predict beforehand whether they’re working or not.” Once the guidelines are understood, collaborators at Georgia Tech will incorporate them into real working games.
This is important because a majority of commercial software marketed as enhancing cognition or brain function, such as Nintendo “Brain Age,” lack experimental evidence. The Food and Drug Administration does not evaluate or regulate claims about how such software could have beneficial health effects.
Companies such as Lumos Labs in San Francisco are not only developing cognitive training games, but also evaluating them.
“We are taking exercises and specific ways of doing cognitive development and converting them into games so that they are enjoyable enough for people to do,” said Mike Scanlon, head of scientific operations at Lumos Labs.
The games on Lumos’ site, Lumosity.com, aren’t explicitly developed for older adults because training on games can provide benefits for a wide range of age groups.
Games are organized into training programs consisting of 20 to 40 sessions of 15 minutes each. Each session in turn can involve playing up to five different mini-games for a few minutes each.
Doretta Youngdahl holds a Wii controller. Research over the past decade repeatedly has shown that such games can sharpen older minds.
Doretta Youngdahl of Pacifica cheers from the sidelines Wednesday during virtual bowling at the senior center, which has formed a league in which the winners are awarded trophies.
Tom Grunwaldt of Folsom, a 59-year-old who has Parkinson’s disease, is a whiz at Nintendo Wii’s bowling game, having achieved the high score of 300 a number of times. He participates in a virtual bowling league at the Folsom Senior Center.
