Video games designed as digital therapies can help people with ADHD, brain injuries and cognitive challenges by activating neuroplasticity. Northeastern’s Tony Simon is at the forefront of this innovative research.
People with ADHD, learning difficulties or brain injuries from strokes can experience huge focus, cognitive and rehabilitative benefits from a surprising activity: playing video games.
For more than 30 years, Northeastern University cognitive neuroscientist Tony Simon has worked on the leading edge of developing digital therapies that can alter brain function.
Simon, who joined the Oakland campus in January, said video games can be designed to activate specific areas of the brain and essentially deliver treatment to people recovering from brain injury or who have neurocognitive challenges.
While commercial games are designed to keep players engaged, therapeutic games activate specific brain processes that unlock the brain’s neuroplasticity, or ability to change structurally in response to stimuli.
“The brain is an activity-dependent organ,” Simon said. “You can’t swallow behaviors.”
A digital therapy must operate as a closed loop, he said, that continuously adjusts and personalizes the challenge to change the brain’s machinery. Keeping users engaged can be challenging because the game has to “constantly keep the user at or near their optimal performance level in order to create neurocognitive change.”
In other words, players never win. But these products are digital therapies, not games.
Simon spoke at a symposium on games and the extended reality industry on Northeastern’s Oakland campus. Extended reality, or XR, describes any technology that blends physical and digital reality.
Over his career, Simon has helped create extended reality therapeutic games for people with very different treatment requirements.
One digital therapy, called FastBrain, targets the neurocognitive systems that underlie a genetic disorder called 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, which causes intellectual disabilities among other symptoms. Simon’s research contributed to developing FastBrain, which has led to behavioral and brain processing improvements for children who played the game.
Simon helped another therapy for people rehabilitating after a stroke. Using head-mounted virtual reality, CogniviveVR creates tasks in an immersive world that adapt to the patient’s physical capability. After playing the game five to six times a week for eight weeks, patients experience significantly improved smoothness of movements.
“What we’re developing is precision medicine because a video game is very adaptive,” Simon said. “At every moment it is figuring out what your capabilities are and adjusting the challenge provided.”
In a previous role at Akili Interactive, Simon helped enhance and expand the company’s Endeavor products, which have improved symptoms for people with ADHD who have difficulty focusing. The therapy forces players to complete tasks while simultaneously suppressing distracting stimuli. Unlike medication, which temporarily stimulates neurotransmitters to improve focus, digital therapy changes brain machinery permanently. Trials involving children and adults with ADHD show significant improvements in focus and quality of life, Simon said.
The Games and XR Symposium also featured presentations by Noah Falstein of the Inspiracy and Brittan Heller of Stanford University and Atlantic Council. Azad Balabanian of Niantic, Dan Miller of Unity and Rachid ElGuerrab of Hiaba Labs engaged in a panel discussion about games, XR and AI in entertainment.
The symposium was organized by Nathalie Mathe, Game Science and Design professor and graduate program coordinator on the Oakland campus, which offers graduate degrees in both Game Science and Design and Extended Realities.