A community member tries out a game on a tablet, with a sensor on her head to measure brain activity. Here at the community care center, the “Stone Soup” project has a new brain training system, to help older people retain their mental faculties.
Device user
It’s a novelty, because I often play arrow-shooting games on my tablet, but it’s not quite the same as that. It’s sharpening your brainpower, I suppose.
The device trains the user’s mental capacities, at the exact right level for them personally, using simple equations and image recognition tasks. The center is recruiting 15 to 20 students, whose data will be used to help improve the system for clinical monitoring and evaluation purposes.
Chang Shih-hsin
Taipei Medical University Hospital
We’ve brought it into Taiwan from Japan, to do some clinical trials, including some trials in the community. In the end, we want to use the system to provide care for older adults with mild dementia.
Yu Chin-shu
Device developer
There are three things we’re training with the frontal lobe: memory, concentration, and responsiveness. We’ve designed many different games for those. The game you play each day will be slightly different, so you don’t get too familiar with it. But in the background there’s an enormous amount of data that’s being computed. We can tell you where you are in comparison to other people of your age – ahead or behind.
With Taiwan set to become a super-aged society by 2025, more than 20% of the country’s older adults will be living in Taipei. For community centers like this, providing home demonstrations is getting more and more important.
Lu Hsin-yi
Taipei Medical University Hospital
Walking frames like this are the most common ones. But people often buy the wrong one. If you’re supporting yourself with your hand strength over the long-term, and you have to lift your hands up high to walk, then actually it causes hand pain. So we can recommend a walking frame with wheels, and they can try it out right there.
Choosing the right mobility tool for you is not necessarily an easy task. Community centers like this bring together lots of services for older adults, helping everyone to move with the times, and stay active and vital.
