Designing Exercise Equipment for Your Brain
Sunday, February 17th, 2008
Many applications in cognitive design involve “juicing up” existing artifacts so that they have greater sensorial, affective, mental or psychological impact. Rarely do we get the chance to design artifacts whose sole purpose is to enhance and support cognition. An example of a “pure play” cognitive design is the rapidly growing area of brain training. These programs and devices aim to improve the memory, attention, perception and other cognitive functions (for aging baby boomers) by engaging us in simple and repetitious mental exercises.
The marketing is growing. According to experts at the Emerging Brain Fitness Software Market: Building Better Brains, the US market in 2007 was $225M, over twice what it was in 2005. The leading vendor, Nintendo has shipped some 15 million units of its popular Brain Age and Brain Training games.
There is evidence that some BUT NOT ALL of the programs do in fact produce short-term improvements after weeks of training. However claims of longer term overall “brain health” improvements are still circumstantial.
Brain training promises to be a real proving ground for cognitve designers. We will track the developments closely in this blog.
