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Dakim Blog

March 1, 2011

Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood…and We Took the One to the Happy Halibut!

Written by: Dan Michel

Our story continues…Following our success with introducing the Dakim computer-based touch-screen system to seniors, we were able to secure our initial round of substantial investment funding. With that, we began in earnest to create our content—the cognitive exercises that make up Dakim BrainFitness.

Scientific validity and results are essential in brain fitness, so our first inclination was to develop games and activities that very closely paralleled standardized neurological tests and exercises. We thought that in doing so, we would make it easy for health care professionals to research their effectiveness. Today, in hindsight, it’s easy to see that if we had followed this path, Dakim BrainFitness would be repetitive and boring, and highly unlikely to sustain long-term use by the player.

That last point—sustaining long-term use—indeed turned out to be central to our customers achieving and maintaining long-term benefits. It would also become one of the key differentiators between Dakim BrainFitness and other brain-training products on the market.

So, using standardized neurological testing only as a springboard, and bearing in mind the goal of long-term benefits through long-term use, we forged ahead with our creative efforts. Then, one day, we came to a fork in our content development road, and everything changed!
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January 24, 2011

Jack LaLanne, our mentor and friend

Written by: Dan Michel

Like many, I grew up watching Jack LaLanne in the early days of television—-on a 13-inch, black-and-white TV with rabbit ears. Jack was then–and was still when I eventually met him more than a half-century later—-a true original, a force of nature, and a champion for doing something good in this world.

Jack’s message was simple: Living a healthy lifestyle and exercising is not only good for you, it’s fun. He made spreading this message his joyous mission for more than eight decades.

While best-known as the godfather of the physical fitness movement, Jack was an equally enthusiastic proponent of brain fitness. He saw physical and brain fitness as essential tools for getting through daily life, and both as a matter of “use it or lose it.” He always did everything he could to help others get the most out of life by following that philosophy.

Jack LaLanne, fitness guru, seated at the Dakim BrainFitness System
Jack LaLanne, a true original (2009)

We at Dakim, both young and not-so-young, were so honored to be associated with Jack these last few years as he brought his special brand of inspiration to the brain fitness movement. Our hearts go out to Elaine, his wife of 51 years, who has lost her loving partner in life. As for the rest of us, we have lost a great mentor and very dear friend.

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There are many videos available on the Internet from Jack’s fitness show, but we favored sharing this one with our blog-followers: Jack on simply being happy. Enjoy!

September 29, 2010

Heart-Stopping Action at the Senior Center!

Written by: Dan Michel

Okay, here’s a summary of the situation I found myself in after three years of “startup” mode…

I had no source of income as I continued developing the concept and initial content (cognitive exercises) for this computer-based cognitive activities device. I’d spent months testing and refining the cognitive exercises in storyboard form with seniors who generously gave of their time. I’d partnered with Jerry Robinson to write the software to build a prototype (on an eMac computer converted to a touch-screen interface)… and finally our prototype was ready to test.

I had arranged with an amazing senior center in Van Nuys, Calif., called OneGeneration, to do my first test with the computer prototype. For better or worse, the first person who was going to “play” the Dakim Activity Center was an individual with mild Alzheimer’s disease. To start the program then, as today, the user had to touch an on-screen button.

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August 26, 2010

If Ya Gotta Choose Between Good and Lucky…

Written by: Dan Michel

I had spent months developing and then building what I was now calling the Activity Center. And after seeing it used for a few sessions, its limitations became painfully apparent!

The fundamental problem was that there were just nine doors with nine pictures and sounds. After doing all nine exercises once, my dad and his fellow residents were bound to find it less stimulating and a lot less fun each subsequent time they played. I guess I shoulda thunk of that before I invented it!

To add variety, or even to meet the needs of individuals with differing levels of mental acuity, a staff member would have to be on hand to rotate the transparencies and switch out the sound chip. In the world of senior living communities where the staff is already over-burdened and stretched thin, this would never work.

So I put my thinking cap back on. The answer came in loud and clear: I needed to abandon my months of hard work on the Activity Center and take an entirely different tack.

All of my thinking up to that point had been about analog devices. To put it simply, I had been pursuing a solution in a very mechanical—and old school—way. When I stopped thinking about how to make changing transparencies and sound cards easier, and instead conceptualized the problem more abstractly, it became clear that the solution I sought was digital—a computer.

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August 19, 2010

Lessons My Father Taught Me: Part 3. Inventing Was Always In My Blood!

Written by: Dan Michel

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, my dad had been an inventor and an entrepreneur. I guess some of that runs in my blood, too, because as I learned more about what seemed to challenge and stimulate my dad, my mind turned to inventing some “things” to help make his days more engaging, especially when I couldn’t be there with him.

Early on, I noticed that one aspect of my dad’s particular progression of Alzheimer’s was that, in addition to losing short-term memory, he was also forgetting how to do simple things; the kinds of things that involved both cognition and hand-eye coordination. For example, opening a lock with a key, or undoing a latch on a door—things he had never had to think about before—now proved difficult.

Board_med
Board_CU
My earliest cognitive stimulation invention
(dubbed “The Board”!)

So the first (very crude) device I invented was essentially a wooden board on which there were a series of doors that required the user to open and close common household locks and latches. Behind each of these doors, I put pictures of objects and/or pictures of our family or famous people (past and present). When my dad opened one of the doors, I would ask him to describe what he saw, and then we would talk about it.

This device stimulated my dad, and I could see the benefit he was gaining from it. Another happy surprise was that the device was so popular with the other residents, I ended up building several more so that others could use them as well. In turn, this got me thinking about what would add to and enrich the experience even more. What else? Light and sound!

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