In developing Dakim BrainFitness, we’ve worked closely with a team of leading brain researchers to incorporate findings from the latest scientific research. We also continue to observe and interview many of the thousands of individuals who use our program in senior living communities nationwide. Our commitment to research and development allows us to continually refine and improve Dakim BrainFitness to give people over 60 the very best comprehensive brain fitness program, designed just for them.
Dakim BrainFitness was developed in close collaboration with a scientific advisory board headed by Gary Small, M.D. Dr. Small and his colleagues worked with Dakim’s content team to maximize the effectiveness of the more than 100 brain exercise formats that comprise Dakim BrainFitness.
Because so many studies stress the importance of regular, frequent cognitive exercise in helping prevent cognitive decline, Dakim BrainFitness is designed for long-term use. To accomplish this, we’ve placed a high priority on the fundamental issues of playability and user enjoyment.
Many of the exercises in the Dakim BrainFitness program are inspired by those found in standardized neurological evaluations. Dakim transforms these basic cognitive tasks into imaginative and engaging exercise formats that include music, humor, eye-catching graphics, and video clips to keep users coming back for more.
Here are some examples of how Dakim BrainFitness exercises leverage concepts from established neurological tests:
"Four Unrelated Words" test
Skill tested: Remembering words after incremental time delays
Memory Assessment Scales
Skill tested: Remembering facts after hearing a story
Skill tested: Oral spelling
Watch as words appear in a series of incongruous pairs:
Wishbone-Polka, Basket-Tribe, Sweep-Curfew, Loaf-Caboose.
Then, listen as a word from each pair is read aloud, and identify
its partner. Finally, think back on the words that were read aloud
and identify what they have in common.
©Copyright 2012 Dakim, Inc.
Cognitive areas worked: Short-term memory, attention, critical thinking
"Extra! Extra! From the annals of the outlandish comes another
improbable New Flash..." News Flash stories are whimsical faux-news
items containing dozens of facts and figures to keep straight.
Your job is to recall the (often-absurd) details 20 minutes later.
©Copyright 2012 Dakim, Inc.
Cognitive areas worked: Reading comprehension and short-term memory
The object of this game is to find your way through a jungle of
distracting letters. You’re looking for the one path that will
spell a word, using a single letter from each vertical column.
©Copyright 2012 Dakim, Inc.
Cognitive areas worked: Critical thinking, Language skills
Dakim’s goal is to provide a broad-based program that exercises the areas of the brain we rely on to accomplish the varied cognitive and intellectual tasks in our daily lives.
Dakim’s brain fitness approach is designed to stimulate six essential cognitive domains: Long-Term Memory, Short-Term Memory, Critical Thinking, Visuospatial Orientation, Computation, and Language. To exercise each domain, we’ve created dozens of exercise formats and thousands of individual challenges.
We produce content across five levels of challenge for each of the six cognitive domains. Using proprietary technology to gauge users'’ performance, the different challenge levels ensure that users are always stimulated, but never stumped, no matter what their cognitive level. And since cognitive abilities vary among the domains, Dakim BrainFitness tracks performance in each separate domain, creating a personalized workout profile for each user.
At the lower levels, the program presents users with concrete challenges and highly disparate multiple-choice options. For the higher levels, designed for those with little-to-no cognitive decline, the concepts become more abstract and the answers less obvious, requiring more complex reasoning. The program continually self-adjusts to the participant’s level for each cognitive domain based on performance on previous challenges.
• Level 1: No cognitive decline
• Level 2-3: Age-related decline
• Level 4-5 Mild-to-moderate cognitive impairment (MCI) or dementia
To keep participants involved and excited, Dakim BrainFitness provides a daily "scorecard" of correctly completed challenges at the end of each session. While not a measure of cognitive ability, these scores provide another fun, motivational feature of the workout.
