Dan Michel, co-founder & CEO, Dakim, Inc.

When I look at what Dakim BrainFitness is today—this easy-to-use, rigorous, and entertaining brain workout with all its current games, features, and functionality—I marvel that this has been accomplished in such a relatively short time. It wasn't that long ago that two of the most significant paradigm shifts in my vision occurred; fortunately, in the right direction.

In the midst of commuting between my wife and daughters (Los Angeles) and my dad (Chicago), I had spent months developing and then building "The Box," which I was now calling the Activity Center. But after seeing it used for a few sessions, its limitations were already painfully apparent!

Dakim Activity Center, analog version (aka, "The Box")

The fundamental problem was that for all the creative effort I was putting into it, there still were just nine doors with nine pictures and sounds. After going through 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.

A computer could present an infinite variety of stimulus activities at an infinite variety of difficulty levels, and best of all it could do it conveniently and cost-effectively.

With a lot of paper, a lot of pencils, and a LOT of coffee, I began designing exercises and creating general specifications for a digital cognitive activity system. One day, after working on this for several months, my wife, Kim, said to me, “We need to build a prototype of this idea to find out if it has any merit.”

They say if you have a choice between being good and lucky—take lucky! But what if you can have both…?

My quest for a prototype took me to the one and only person I knew who was a hands-down expert in computers: Jerry Robinson, owner, operator, and chief honcho of JPR Engineering. I had been a client of JPR Engineering for six or seven years through my ad agency, Michel/Russo. Jerry’s team had configured the software and hardware for all our digital workstations.

Jerry Robinson, co-founder & CTO/CFO, Dakim, Inc.

I brought my wooden, analog Activity Center to Jerry’s office and laid out my vision for a digital activity system. I explained that it needed to have a touch screen, be smart enough to adjust the level of challenge on its own, and have a vast library of exercises. At the end of the meeting, I asked Jerry if he could build a prototype to meet those specifications. He said he could and that he’d call me the next day with a bid.

When Jerry called, he detailed, as I expected, the costs and process of building a prototype. What I didn’t expect was that he had a proposal in mind as well. In thinking about this project, he could already see the potential of such a project becoming a viable product. And the more he thought about such a product, the more he believed it could have a significant and positive impact on the lives of thousands, if not millions, of seniors desiring to maintain their cognitive health. In short, he wanted to be involved in the project in a more meaningful way than just building a prototype.

I took all of 24 hours to think over this proposal. Let’s see…a smart, motivated computer expert who I was comfortable working with already and was not just willing but excited to join me in tilting at the windmills of brain fitness. Yup, I called Jerry the next day and offered a partnership. Happily, Jerry agreed, and the direction of Dakim changed forever…and in more ways than I possibly could have imagined!

Dakim Activity Center, digital version built on an eMac

You see, one of the things I knew for sure at that time was that Jerry was one of the smartest (a bonafide genius), most creative, and hard-working people I had ever met. But what I didn’t know then that I sure know now (and here’s where being lucky comes in) was that Jerry was and is one of a small handful of experts in the world in the fields of automated workflow production software and digital asset management and utilization.

It would be this expertise that would enable Dakim to produce a broader variety and higher volume (by a mile!) of original, richly produced brain games that were—and are—unlike any other product released by the competitors we would soon meet down the road. And so we built our first prototype on an eMac: some 25 original exercises presented at three different levels of difficulty.

Well, at that point I was pretty convinced that, as Sister Maria sings in The Sound of Music, “Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good!”

In my next blog, I’ll describe our early adventures in usability testing with seniors. Let’s just say that before the very first test, my heart was pounding out of my chest as the computer asked the test subject, who had never used a computer, to touch the screen to get started!

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: As co-founder and CEO of Dakim, Inc., Dan Michel is the visionary behind Dakim BrainFitness. This blog chronicles his journey through being a caregiver of a parent with Alzheimer’s disease to establishing Dakim BrainFitness as a leading tool for seniors in the fight for brain fitness. He writes from the "Corner Office," which he shares with Dakim's comptroller!

Brenda Matteson, editorial manager, Dakim, Inc.

Long before coming to Dakim, I had the privilege of working in patient and family education in the Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Spinal Cord Injury departments of the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Seattle, and at Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey. From the patients and families, psychologists, social workers, and nurses I worked with, I learned a valuable lesson (among many others!): The physical or cognitive disability of one member of a family can have an overwhelming impact on the family as a whole.

At the crux of this impact is the role that the affected person played in the family up to that point. As someone’s parent or child, sibling or spouse, they had been someone their family depended on or saw as a reflection of themselves. At the worst of it, whole families could fall into disarray because, for example, the mother who facilitated any number of things for them—from getting meals on the table to mediating family feuds—was no longer able to do so. Not to mention that due to the quirky nature of brain injury, her personality might have changed—from her likes and dislikes to her overall demeanor—and she no longer resembled the person her family had always known her to be.

As healthcare professionals, we had the benefit of knowing nothing about our patients before they came through our doors. We didn’t know them “before” so we could develop our relationships with them as the people they were “now.” We hadn’t ever depended on them for anything, so we had no expectations beyond the task at hand.

When my mother began to seriously decline in December 1996, everything I had learned at work about distance and no expectations was completely irrelevant—this was personal. All I knew was that I was losing my mother—the one person who had known me longer than anyone—my age plus those very first nine months. I remember just wanting her to snap out of it—to go back to being there for me as she’d always been. I kept wanting her to somehow rise to the occasion; do a buck and wing across the kitchen again; play Bach’s Fugue in G on the piano again; cook up her delicious roast beef and Yorkshire pudding; continue to help me decide what to do with my own life—to still be there as my mother. Instead, her life was consumed by her failing health, and she was gradually moving away from me.

My dad’s aging was plagued less by severe ill health than by depression. The older he got, the more he gradually lost sight of the man he had always seen himself to be. And when he lost that vision—the “hail fellow well met,” as he would put it—he simply deflated before my very eyes. As with my mother, I wanted him to bounce back, especially because I'd come to depend upon that vision of my dad to validate my own sense of myself, particularly in the ways he and I were alike.

In both my parents’ cases, it was non-family members who rode to the rescue. For my mom, it was Hospice Care that stepped in and tended to her needs patiently and with great caring when, as I look back, my family had already begun to grieve about losing her. Our trying to care for her at the same time that our hearts were breaking was probably harder on her than anything. With a little healthy distance from these acute emotions, Hospice gave her dignity, better care, and a little distance of her own simply because they had no expectations of her.

For my dad, I will be eternally grateful to a handful of friends who didn’t just pay a cursory visit once a year to an old man in his old home, but instead, regularly took him out to shows or restaurants. Those evenings out allowed my dad to “put on the dog” and feel more like a person instead of seeing himself through his children’s eyes as the declining patriarch of our family.

I now know that these were not just people performing their jobs or doing some onerous duty for an old friend. These were people who had important relationships with my parents—separate and distinct from my own, and with just enough distance to do for my parents the things I couldn’t at the time.

Not so long ago, I had the privilege of doing the same for a friend of mine whose father had a stroke. I was honored when he and his sister asked for my help and glad I could be there for their dad and family.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Brenda Matteson is the editorial manager at Dakim. Her position entails envisioning, editing, and writing new games for Dakim BrainFitness. She has been with Dakim since October 2006, where she came as an already well-established editor and content creator for various forms of media for “end users” (a fancy technology industry term for “all us regular folks”!).

Dan Michel, co-founder & CEO, Dakim, Inc.

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.

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!

Dad working with the 9-window version of my invention (dubbed "The Box"!)

So I built a larger version—a tabletop cabinet with a series of nine doors. As before, each door locked using a different common household latch. Behind each door was a dark screen, along with four buttons—two for sound, and two for picture. When my dad pushed the two sound buttons at the same time, he’d hear a sound—say, the roar of a lion. I would then ask him what made that sound. Whether he got the answer right or not, he could push the two picture buttons at the same time to get a reward (or to learn the answer). A transparency of a picture—such as a lion—would be illuminated in the window. The picture, and the exercise as a whole, acted as a springboard into conversation. In this case, we talked about lions, Africa, zoos—whatever seemed related.

Now, although my dad was an inventor, I myself had never done much in the way of tinkering with electronics. To make this box work, I had to figure out how to wire the sound and hook up some lights to illuminate the image transparencies.

For the sounds, my grandson Jack “donated” one of his toys called Animal Train…which I promptly took apart! This toy used a sound chip to play the voices of eight animals and a train—the exact kinds of sound I was looking for. (Thanks, Jack!) To illuminate the picture transparencies, I used a low-voltage Malibu Garden Light set.

Up to this point, I had seen the activity directors at my dad’s residence often use children’s toys or educational supplies with dementia patients. They had the right idea, and these were pretty much the only kinds of devices that were available at the time to meet their needs, but I felt that while their intentions were good, the use of stimulus intended for children was still demeaning to adults. To remedy this, I made a point of ensuring that everything about the look and feel of this device (and the many versions to come) was adult in its orientation, including the choice of images, which were largely photos instead of cartoons.

Dad and great-grandson Jack, working on a modern art sculpture together

A second stimulation device I made was inspired by how my dad had always liked to build things and do things with his hands. My idea was to create a grown-up version of the Erector Set (a wonderful construction toy from the 1940s and ’50s that still sells today). This took me to Home Depot, where I purchased a bunch of metal brackets, nuts, bolts, and washers.

The “Modern Art Sculpture Kit” was a hit! The complete experience included not only the construction phase but also taking the sculptures apart and sorting and putting away the components in designated storage containers. I eventually purchased four times the components I had originally so that four residents could sit around a table and construct their sculptures. All I had to do to get the residents started was to hand them some parts—they did the rest. They even connected their sculptures to each other’s by creating bridges between them. All in all, the residents were kept engaged, stimulated, and entertained—on their own—for about an hour at a time (which, in community residence time, is pretty significant!).

One of the women in residence at my dad's senior living community, working with the Modern Art Sculpture Kit

On a side note, the sculpture kit also revealed an interesting reality. In working to understand my dad's cognitive condition, I had previously learned that individuals experiencing dementia gradually lose self-awareness. As part of this process, they also lose the gender biases that have been drilled into all of us all of our lives. This was actually evidenced by the fact that the women residents in the assisted living part of the community took to building these nuts ‘n’ bolts sculptures with as much enthusiasm as the men!

Well, that's enough for now! In my next blog, I’ll tell you how I founded Dakim, and how we made the transition to the digital age.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: As co-founder and CEO of Dakim, Inc., Dan Michel is the visionary behind Dakim BrainFitness. This blog chronicles his journey through being a caregiver of a parent with Alzheimer’s disease to establishing Dakim BrainFitness as a leading tool for seniors in the fight for brain fitness. He writes from the "Corner Office," which he shares with Dakim's comptroller!

When most people think about the health of their brain, mind, and memory, they picture Alzheimer's disease and its devastating end stages. In fact, it's frequently the fear of Alzheimer's that motivates them to take steps towards protecting the health of their brain.

Unfortunately, the biggest risk factors in Alzheimer's are age and genetics (neither one of which can be changed) and there's no proven method to prevent or cure the disease. Some studies suggest that lifestyle changes may be able to reduce some risk factors, but there's little proof that these changes can overcome those important genetic and age factors of the disease.

So why spend energy, money, and time on brain fitness?

Because the healthier your brain is, the better equipped it is to cope with any of the potential challenges that can damage mind and memory functions.

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My Grandmother turned 89 this month, and while she has  more than her share of aches and pains some days,  her brain is in high gear.  She still drives, she's more socially active than anyone I know (regardless of age). She does water aerobics twice a week, eats right, follows her doctors' advice religiously, and is constantly challenging her brain with computerized sewing machines, artistic endeavors, and historical novels that would bog me down.

Of course, she does forget things, as we all do.  She misses a hair appointment here and there, occasionally loses track of her umpteen doctors appointments, forgets a grandson-in-laws birthday now and then. And, most amusingly?

Last week (after a full day of doctor's appointments, exercise class, and a trip to Walmart) she pulled up to the drugstore drive-thru, paid for the prescriptions with a check, closed her purse and drove off - without her pills.

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