‘Wizard’ brain training app may help people with schizophrenia, researchers say

Developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, the new app could help make it easier for Schizophrenia patients to live independent lives.

Schizophrenia is estimated to cost £13.1 billion a year in the UK, researchers said, so even small improvements in cognitive functions could substantially reduce direct and indirect costs by helping patients live more independently as well as improve their well-being and health.

They added that while there are no medications to improve cognitive function for people with schizophrenia, there is increasing evidence that computer-assisted training can help them overcome some of their symptoms, with better outcomes in daily functioning and their lives.

The game, “Wizard“, is designed to help so-called episodic memory – the type of memory needed to remember where you left your keys several hours ago, or to remember a few hours later where you parked your auto in a multi-storey vehicle park.

In addition to their collaboration with Cambridge University, the app now has brain exercises developed by C8 Sciences , an organization dedicated to improving the outlook of children with Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and Applied Cognitive Engineering , which has developed cognitive exercises to improve the performance of athletes.

Wizard is the product of a nine-month-long project between neuroscientists, psychologists, game developers and people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The sport builders augmented a reminiscence process with a narrative by which the participant might select and identify their very own character, and gamers have been rewarded with further in-game actions that have been unbiased of the cognitive coaching.

Wizard requires players to remember the location of patterns in space correctly, rewarding their success with additional in-game activities. Participants in the training group played the memory game for a total of eight hours in a period of four weeks.

When the data was collected, researchers tested all the participants’ episodic memory, their level of enjoyment and motivation, and their score on the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) scale – which medics use to rate the social, occupational and psychological functioning of adults. Sahakian and her team found that those schizophrenia patients who became motivated because of the game performed the best at it. This is crucial as the lack of motivation is one of the most common facets of the mental condition. Importantly, the patients with schizophrenia enjoyed playing the game and were motivated to continue.

“This proof-of-concept study is important because it demonstrates that the memory game can help where drugs have so far failed”, said lead researcher Barbara Sahakian from the department of psychiatry at Cambridge.

The Wizard game will be included as a mode within the popular brain-training app, Peak, after it began a partnership with Cambridge in April 2015.

Wizard, which was designed with input from patients and game designers, tasks player with entering rooms, finding items in boxes and then recalling where the items were placed. Rights to the Wizard game were licensed to Peak by Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation company.