An entrepreneur has started an Indiegogo campaign to support a digital health platform that inserts family pictures into gaming and art therapy activities. The aim is to help Alzheimer’s disease patients and others battling neurological conditions as they struggle with memory loss. MemVu wants to add apps to the program to make it more flexible to use.
MemVu Founder and President Bill Tymoszczuk developed the company’s activity center to personalize cognitive thinking activities to stimulate memory. The program to work on word skills, speed, visual and problem-solving skills came about after his own father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. His experience made him realize that looking at photos of family, friends, places and experiences helped improve his memory and disposition in the earlier stages of the disease. The idea is to make the experience of sharing photos more like an activity that helps families get more involved with caring for loved ones and staying connected.
The $50,000 in upgrades the campaign is intended to make possible, such as apps and a more intuitive platform, are based on feedback from caregivers and healthcare professionals. The company also wants to add a game to make it easier to recall currency and for patients to find their way home, according to its Indiegogo campaign page. Were it to greatly exceed its fundraising goal, then MemVu would turn its attention to hiring an activity director or product manager with long-term care industry experience and add to its IT staff to develop more activities and to expand the Global Cognitive Activities Project. It would also start working on cognitive assessment tools.
The company’s head office is in Yardley, Pennsylvania, although its innovation team is based in Cleveland, Ohio. Tymoszczuk’s background includes working as a researcher for University Hospitals of Cleveland before dabbling in pharma. In 2008, he became CEO of BestHomeHealthCare.com, a company that later became part of MemVu.
Its approach is part of a broader trend of using gaming platforms to make improving or stimulating cognitive skills engaging and seem less like a frustrating exercise. Developmental optometrist Dr. Jeffrey Becker and neuropsychologist Dr. Robert Bohlander of the NeuroSensory Center of Eastern Pennsylvania developed a collection of iPad games to improve visual motor skills in patients recovering from stroke and head trauma as well as children with autism and attention deficit disorder. They test the user’s ability to focus on an image, track and pursue it.
A study published in Neurology earlier this year found that Nintendo Wii games worked as well or better than a computer program specifically for cognitive training, according to a summary of the study on the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation’s website. These consoles also tend to be less expensive and more entertaining than the computer program. Treating the mild cognitive impairments associated with Parkinson’s disease could not only improve a person’s quality of life, but also might delay the onset of dementia, the study said.
