Researchers have created a mobile game to help support schizophrenia sufferers.
The Wizard brain-training game is intended to boost episodic memory in people with schizophrenia. That’s the type of memory needed to remember where you’ve parked your car or left your keys, and it’s particularly impaired in schizophrenia sufferers. With no licensed drug treatment for such cognitive impairments, this game could be a way of helping people cope in their daily lives, and it could even help them get back to work.
The University of Cambridge has licensed Wizard as part of the Peak brain-training app on iOS and Android, releasing today as the Cambridge University & Peak Advanced Training Plan.
The game is a collaboration between psychologists, neuroscientists, a professional game-developer, and people with schizophrenia. It weaves a memory task into a story and rewards progress with additional gameplay activities.
Professor Barbara Sahakian from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, U.K. carried out a four-week study using Wizard. Schizophrenia sufferers who played the game for eight hours over those four weeks performed significantly better on an episodic memory test than those who didn’t. They also saw an increase on the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) scale, which rates the social, occupational, and psychological functioning of adults.
“This proof-of-concept study is important because it demonstrates that the memory game can help where drugs have so far failed,” said Sahakian. “Because the game is interesting, even those patients with a general lack of motivation are spurred on to continue the training.”
The research group will now carry out further studies with larger sample sizes to confirm the findings.