Designing the BrainTagger Researcher Platform to Automate Development of Customized Cognitive GamesSerious games have grown significantly in popularity, but proving their scientific validity through research studies is a common hurdle for researchers and game developers. To scale up capacity to collaborate with different groups of researchers, Centivizer Inc. (a University of Toronto spinoff company) has employed a user-centered design process to design a BrainTagger Research Platform (BRP) that will largely automate the development process of its customizable serious games for cognitive assessment. This new development will increase the capacity to gather research data needed to improve game mechanisms and demonstrate game validity. University of Toronto | Scientific Excellence - Advancing Knowledge | 2021-03-29 | Bella (Yigong) Zhang, Mark Chignell |
Cognitive Assessment of Executive Functions using Serious Games This presentation will review several years of work on developing serious games for cognitive assessment with particular focus on executive functioning. First reviewed is a game that Dr. Mark Chignell has developed for delirium screening in emergency departments, with Dr. Jacques Lee of Sunnybrook and Mt. Sinai hospitals.
Next presented is a battery of serious games that Dr. Chignell and his team are developing with Dr. Bruce Morton of Western University. Currently, a set of six games implements six different psychological tasks (cognitive speed, response inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility, spatial attention, delayed match to sample), but with a common whacamole game design.
Each game will be demonstrated before presenting BrainTagger, a social media-friendly version of the game that is being used to collect normative data for different age groups. Experimental data will be presented showing that this response-inhibition game is highly correlated with the Go/No-Go task, a standard psychological measure of response inhibition.
Next discussed are plans for using fMRI brain scanning while playing these games to validate the types of brain activation that are produced by playing each game. After the presentation, Dr. Chignell would like to have a discussion on the role of serious games in cognitive assessment, and the benefits of having frequent cognitive assessment as people get older.
Link: https://www.mie.utoronto.ca/events/psycheng-seminar-cognitive-assessment-of-executive-functions-using-serious-games-with-mark-chignell/ University of Toronto | KTEE - Knowledge Mobilization | 2019-10-10 | Mark Chignell, Bella (Yigong) Zhang, Henrique Matulis |
Mobile Executive Functions testing workshopWe conducted a workshop on mobile executive functions testing at Western University. In this workshop, we demoed our existing TAG-ME games and discussed how they can be used to evaluate the cognitive status of children and the elderly. We gathered the requirements for the next iterations of TAG-ME games for future research studies to validate the games. Western University, University of Toronto | KTEE - Knowledge Mobilization | 2019-07-26 | J Bruce Morton, Mark Chignell, Bella (Yigong) Zhang, Henrique Matulis |
Ubiquitous Cognitive Assessment in the Aging PopulationCognitive status affects health outcomes and functional independence, but cognitive assessments of older people are infrequent. We are developing scientifically validated game-based assessment tools that allow older people to be tested across a battery of cognitive abilities relevant to functional independence, and general wellbeing. In this poster we report on past progress and future plans. We briefly describe the six games developed thus far (which can be played at the conference in the Centivizer exhibit). We summarize research that has already validated our games for measuring cognitive speed and response inhibition. We then discuss our plans for further validation of the games using fMRI brain scanning and experiments. Our goal is not only to characterize cognitive ability in terms of specific cognitive processes, but also to use machine learning to predict problems (e.g., lesions) in brain areas and pathways based on detailed performance across our suite of games. University of Toronto, Western University | Scientific Excellence - Advancing Knowledge | 2019-10-23 | Bella (Yigong) Zhang, Mark Chignell, J Bruce Morton |