How we’ve built our mental health self-management mobile game! Part 2-memory and focus tracking
We’re building mindora, a mental health self-management mobile game. Mindora consists of eight different mini-games all designed to support different aspects of your mental health from mood tracking, to building cognitive behavioral therapy skills, to measuring changes in your memory and focus. We believe that supporting your mental health can and should be fun.
This is the second in a three part series sharing the inspiration behind each of the mini- games within mindora; how we’re building them, and where we are taking them in the future! In this part, we share how and why we’re building our memory and focus tracking mini-games.
Throughout our journey building mindora, we’ve learned that many folks don’t realize how changes in mood as well as conditions like anxiety and depression directly impact cognition, in other words, your ability to pay attention, react to new information, and remember information. We typically think of insufficient sleep or aging as impacting our cognitive ability. Indeed they can. However, changes in our ability to remember and focus can also be a function of changes in our mood.
The connection between mood and cognition can create a problematic feedback loop when you experience cognitive impact as a result of conditions like anxiety or depression, particularly if you’re in a cognitively demanding job. It’s easy to get frustrated or upset with yourself if you’re having trouble focusing or remembering information due to mental health struggles. This self criticism can then in turn make your mental health struggles more difficult, only impacting your cognition further and making you more upset. Speaking from personal experience, it’s frightening and upsetting to say the least.
So why does mood affect cognition? What’s the science behind this? There’s a lot we don’t understand about the brain but what we do know is that mood impacts changes in brain chemistry and physiology. A person’s mood, environment, and experiences affect levels of neurotransmitters, the small molecules that play a key role in information transmission in the brain. This relationship leads to a further cascade of effects, where the mood and neurotransmitter changes can increase the effects of the other. People often recognize that poor sleep and appetite affect their cognitive ability, both of which are heavily affected by changes in mood.
Changes in cognition can be measured using validated cognitive assessments, short electronic tasks that measure things like reaction time, working memory, and task switching. Examining these assessments with a gaming lens reveals their similarity to many game mechanics! As we’ve built our mental health product, mindora, we’ve adapted a few cognitive assessments to mini-games within our product so that users can self track changes in their memory and focus.
We have built four mini-games for tracking changes in memory and focus. “Swipe Right Here” and “Flash Focus” are two of the mini games which track changes in focus and “Repeat After Me” and “Code Words” are focused on changes in memory, though all of them help us measure things like reaction time.
In Swipe Right Here, you swipe the middle tile based on the instructions on the tile. It starts off easy and gets tricky as you progress to higher levels. You’re scored based on how many accurate swipes you get in the designated time. We designed this game loosely inspired by assessments for selective attention, the ability to follow instructions even when they change in real time.
In Flash Focus you get an instruction of a color to press. It starts off straightforward but progresses to become trickier and faster. This game is inspired by the Stroop Effect, a longstanding cognitive assessment used to measure reaction time and focus. You have probably seen this task at some point in your life, particularly if you have ever taken a psychology course!
Code Words is a word association game where you get a code word and need to identify similar words on the game board within the allotted time. The choice of words is initially straightforward but it progresses as more complex associations (e.g. analogies) are introduced. The game might feel similar to word games that you’ve played on your phone before. It was inspired by word association tasks that are included in many cognitive assessments which measure working memory and verbal processing.
Repeat After Me is a game that presents a flashing sequence of colored lights which you need to repeat in the exact order. It starts off with a short sequence and gets progressively longer. See how long you can remember a sequence! This game was inspired by working memory tasks that are used in cognitive assessments.
The scores and data generated as you play these mini-games are used to generate insights on focus and memory as you engage with mindora. These insights can be helpful to give you a sense of what’s going on with your mental health holistically. We’re designing insights to be personalized and to keep you in the loop on changes in memory and focus, not as a comparison to others. We’re passionate about empowering people to understand and improve their mental health through building better understanding, of well, themselves!
Reviewed by our medical advisor, Dr. Gene Yang
