Fighting Dementia with Memory Games

In Series 2 Episode 14 of the Health Points podcast Ben and Pete welcome Bruce Elliott, co-founder and CEO of Memory Lane Games to discuss his journey from the dot-com boom to creating games for people with dementia.

The app features simple quiz-style games that trigger positive memories and improve communication. The focus is on socialization rather than scoring. Bruce explains the importance of errorless learning and personalized content in engaging users. Clinical trials have shown that the app helps carers communicate better with individuals living with dementia. Bruce envisions gamification playing a crucial role in engagement and socialization for various neurological conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease. The long-term goal is to use data analytics to monitor cognitive decline remotely and provide personalized interventions. Memory Lane Games has potential applications in stroke rehabilitation and early detection of cognitive decline across different age groups, making it a valuable tool for families supporting their loved ones with dementia.

You can listen to this episode below:

Outline:

Chapter 1: Introduction to Health Points (00:06 – 00:25)Ben and Pete introduce the show and greet the audience.Chapter 2: Interview with Bruce, Co-founder of Memory Lane Games (00:58 – 04:10)Bruce explains the concept of Memory Lane Games and its goal to trigger positive memories and improve communication.The user experience of the app is described, including simple quiz-style games.Chapter 3: Development and Features of Memory Lane Games (04:57 – 11:54)The development process of Memory Lane Games is discussed, including the involvement of speech and language therapists.The importance of errorless learning and the absence of visible scoring in the games are explained.The potential for incorporating memory stimuli, such as listening to sounds, is mentioned.Chapter 4: Localization and International Reach (13:04 – 21:40)The importance of localization in the app is highlighted, with examples of games tailored to specific cultures.The positive impact of intergenerational play for individuals with dementia is discussed.Clinical trials and partnerships with organizations such as the Alzheimer’s Society and UKRi are mentioned.Chapter 5: Data Analytics and Cognitive Decline Monitoring (22:10 – 29:16)The seven clinical data points tracked by Memory Lane Games are explained.The potential for using these data points as digital biomarkers to monitor cognitive decline is discussed.The scalability and potential applications of the app beyond dementia, such as stroke rehab, are mentioned.Chapter 6: Engaging Audiences and Hyper Personalization (30:44 – 38:05)The importance of creating engaging moments and measuring engagement is emphasized.The process of hyper personalization through importing photos and tagging questions is explained.The challenges of navigation and app discovery for individuals with dementia are discussed.Chapter 7: The Future of Gamification in Health (38:52 – 41:43)The future potential of gamification in promoting healthy aging and supporting individuals with dementia is explored.The importance of finding topics that individuals want to engage in for effective communication and stimulation is highlighted.Conclusion (41:45)

Episode Transcript:

Ben
Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of Health Points where we talk about anything and everything, gamification and health. I’m Ben and here of me is my co host, Pete.

Pete
Hey everyone.

Ben
And joining us today we have Bruce Elliott, who is co founder and CEO of Memory Lane Games. You. Bruce has a 20 year track record of building world class innovative ecommerce companies, having competed with PayPal in the online payment world to bringing Kodak into the blockchain world, Bruce has led startups and publicly traded companies, from startup to more than a million users and 250,000,000 a year in revenues. He’s also led marketing, product development and business development for international online payment, gaming, venture capital, blockchain and now digital health firms. Bruce, it’s great to have you on the show today.

Bruce
I’m thrilled to be here.

Ben
Right, let’s kick off. You’ve had quite a varied career to date. How did he end with memory Lane games?

Bruce
Well, I think the background is due to me being old, so that might be one part of it. So I was in the.com boom and the.com bust days, working in the application service provider, the early cloud and app world, and learned that the difference between being early and being wrong is just ego. And were early in both and then got into online payments just as they were taking off. And that ended up we had a small startup. I joined when there were 40 people, I left when there were 750 people. And that was what brought me to the UK and I live in the Isle of Man for the last 20 years with my family and just love it. And then moved into gaming and into, as we mentioned, blockchain. And I was president of a listed blockchain company in the States.

Bruce
Not easy to be a listed blockchain company in the States. And our first big project was with Eastman Kodak. We launched the first fully regulated SEC and New York Stock Exchange, approved initial coin offering, the Kodak coin and launched an image rights management blockchain platform with Eastman Kodak 130 year old brand. We launched it at CES 2018 and the next day Kodak is back. Was on the COVID of every business newspaper in the world. And then it was a complete flop because were the first ones ever to ask for KYC and us accredited investor status for initial coin offerings. And were early and ego again. And then I was sitting in a pub with my good friend here in the Isle of Man.

Bruce
We’re talking about our mums and his mum’s now 94 with vascular dementia and my mom’s 90 back in Calgary in Canada. Sharp as attack. And we’re talking about what they both have in common. Of course, it was a love volt family photos. And I wondered if can we turn those photos into games? And my friend Peter says, actually we’re turning memories into games. And we started memory laying games the next day and we built an app and we built a couple of games and our moms liked them. And then the next thing, Covid hit and the app blew up. And now we’re sitting here with 100,000 downloads with virtually no marketing and games played last month in 134 countries and all designed and co designed with people living with dementia.

Ben
Incredible. Wow. I think that you’re our first guest from the Alaman. And who knows, there was so much innovation and forward thinking in pubsy Alaman as well. Absolutely remarkable. So let’s jump into memory lane games. Can you tell us what it looks like from a user, from a participant? What would their interaction with the game look like?

Bruce
So we kept our design thinking, really around our mums. And so we designed the simplest, easiest way to interact and what our goal is to trigger positive memories, but also go one step further and foster improved communication. That’s the real key difference from brain training and difference from early detection and difference from a lot of technologies that are out there. Wonderful, wonderful technologies. But we focus on socialization, getting people talking and that it’s not just toe tapping that you hear with music when you have the videos we’ve all seen of people living with dementia, tapping their toes to Swan Lake and such, but going right through into socialization. And that’s the magic of what we’ve done. Now what the user experience is simple quiz style games. But we have 3000 games in the app. So you always find something that you’re interested to play.

Bruce
So whether it’s finish the lyrics. 1960s, whether it’s pasta, whether it’s deciduous trees. We made a game on deciduous trees because someone’s dad was really into deciduous trees. We have games on every city across the UK, Ireland, Germany, the US, Canada, Philippines, India, Australia. So where did you grow up, love? Well, I grew up in Calgary. Well, we have a game on Calgary. Let’s play. And it’s simple, multiple choice, but very slow. So the photos come up and that’s a visual stimulus. Then the question comes up slowly after and that’s a cognitive stimulus. And then you touch answer. If you get the answer wrong, it just disappears. And that’s errorless learning.

Bruce
And then the reward, the emotional stimulus from the reward and the interaction triggers the language, and then that’s all wrapped up within these fine motor skills that are actually able to be done by people living with dementia. And that process was described to us when were in Phoenix recently at the Mayo Clinic and another group, because were fortunate enough to be invited to the Mayo Clinic and ASU medtech accelerator in March. And I met 30 of the top Alzheimer’s and dementia researchers at ASU and Demeo, and they all sat there and shook their heads about us. And then now we get it. Games is medicine. This is working, our clinical work. But we just get people talking social cognition, and that’s the difference. But it looks like a simple quiz game with no scoring. It’s all about socialization, not scoring.

Pete
You mentioned it’s always an image. And then the question, do you have quizzes which are listening to sounds, things like that, other memory stimuli?

Bruce
Yeah. So we get asked, the most common things we get asked are, how come there’s no scoring? We say that because it’s not for you. And the second is, how come there’s no music? Because many of our most popular games are. Finish the lyrics. 1960s, hey, dude, hey, rude, hey Jude. Those kind of things. And our speech and language therapist. Therapist panel that we have international. They don’t want us to have music because they find it distracting, actually, of getting to the actual conversational piece, which is what the social cognition that we’re focused on. I’m also too cheap. We’ve had meetings with some of the biggest record labels and a couple of hundred grand to start. And we’d like to keep everything lean, but it’s really nondistracting. So we’ve really focused on. We’ve considered it as a music, as a reward, possibly.

Bruce
But right now, we’re just focused on beautiful games, pictures of Elvis and such, and people just start talking about Elvis and their memories of Frank Sinatra and those kind of things. And that’s what we want, is that interaction.

Ben
So I think what’s been really interesting to hear so far, Bruce, is to begin with errorless learning, but also, then no points, no scores. And actually, when you look at a lot of the gamification tools that we look at, it is about actually learning from mistakes. It is about, you make errors, and that’s how you lose points, you don’t gain points. All the key game features and game mechanics we’ve seen a lot of the gamification services that we interview, you haven’t included, and yet you’ve been incredibly successful. Now, where did that learning come from? Was it around engaging with people living with Alzheimer’s? Was it a research paper? Was it experts? How did that feature function pathway develop?

Bruce
Well, I’ll tell you two things. First is while there’s no scoring visible to the user, we track seven clinical data points, accuracy, frequency, duration, percent of liked games, what the content patterns are, all of those kind of things. So deep analytic lag time between questions and response, all of those kind of things we track. But for the user, they don’t see any of it because they don’t need to. They’re just enjoying this activity. But that means we can do remote monitoring in people’s homes because they’re just sitting, playing. We’re working with a group that are doing vitals over video, capturing spo two and heart rate and a few things, but they can’t get people to sit long enough in front of a screen. We do, because they play our games for 13 minutes, 17 minutes at a time. Visible scoring? No.

Bruce
But under the hood, absolutely. But we started out, our guiding principle was frustration free. For people living with dementia and homes in care homes in hospitals, it’s that instant frustration that just stops engagement. And so when were meeting with the Mayo Clinic, one of their computerized cognitive rehab researchers started playing our game and got a wrong answer. And it just gently disappeared. And she goes, oh, my gosh, that’s errorless learning. We called it frustration free because we didn’t want to upset our mums. But she said, that’s absolutely vital in stroke rehab because you need to get people to start and then keep playing. And as soon as they get something wrong, they stop. She said, wow. Then she said, but wouldn’t it be great if you could do some activities of daily living games like how to get dressed in the morning?

Bruce
And I said, you mean like this? And I showed her a game. What’s the first step in getting dressed? And if going through these? Because we worked with speech and language therapists to develop a number of those games, we’ve got 300 of those type games on that.

Ben
13 minutes or 17 minutes. Quite a reasonable length of interaction to maintain anyone’s attention. What is it you do to make sure people are still captivated? How many questions or quizzes might someone interact with in that time?

Bruce
Yeah. So each game is typically six questions. So the quiz comes in, you see a photo and then a question. Finish the lyrics. Night Elvis, these blue suede blank. And you have the answers come in and you touch those, and then you get a reward of a different picture of an accrect well done. And then you move to the next question, but you have to actually touch the screen to go to the next question because people are still talking. And when were doing codesign sessions, they were still talking and we had moved automatically to the next screen and they’re going, wait a minute, I’m not finished talking. And the whole point when we come to our clinical work is it’s all about the socialization. So, in effect, we built in pauses, and that was really important.

Bruce
But what we also do is our recommendation engine. After you finish a game, you rate it, do you like it? Or you didn’t like it. And everyone loves that. They feel empowered because we say, did you like it? Yes. Or it wasn’t for me. So we don’t say you didn’t like it, just, it wasn’t for me. And people really enjoy that. But that gives us a trigger. Plus what games you’ve played and the difficulty and the content to what games we’re going to recommend to you next. So after you finish a game, we recommend two games that you’re probably going to like. And so you keep going. You don’t have to go back to the main screen and search through our catalog. We will continue to keep that going.

Pete
I love that one of your key design principles is that you didn’t want to upset your mums. So I’m interested to know, what’s your testing process for each game? Do you test it on other people before you even let it near your mum?

Bruce
Well, it’s interesting. My mom’s been a great guide for us. We launched a game called Cakes, which was really popular in the UK, and my mom called me and said, bruce, I got every one of those questions wrong. Oh, my gosh. What? Mom, are you okay? And it’s because they were european cakes, Battenberg cakes, and these Ashia didn’t know any of them. So localization has become a really important piece for us. So philippine street foods in the Philippines, and our canadian cakes and british. So we’ve really worked hard on localization, but we test all of our games internally. We’re using Chat GBT in a lot of our game creation to start, but always with human reviews. But chat GBT has found some amazing things.

Bruce
We were presenting in Phoenix, and so we made a game on Phoenix landmarks from the 1960s, and Chat GBT wrote the six questions for us. We love them. And one of them was, what’s the name of this famous restaurant in Phoenix? And it’s got a picture of the inside. And every single person I showed that to knew the answer was Durant’s. And then every single person said, do you know that’s where the mob used to meet? We didn’t know that, we didn’t know why it was significant, but chat, GBT knew there was something infamous about that place, but it started a conversation. Every time we had that question, we started a conversation. But we also have a living lab, in effect, because we’ve had 100,000 downloads of our app all around the world. Games played in 134 countries last month.

Bruce
So we have that living lab. We know by country what games work, what games don’t. The US is now our biggest user market, and we had 21,000 quiz games played last month, 500 hours of gameplay. So we’ve got outstanding insights into what games connect, what games take longer to play and which is what we want.

Pete
And you kind of want games to take longer to play, don’t you? Is that like a sign of. It’s a good one.

Bruce
Exactly, yeah. No, that’s absolutely true, because, again, we’re not focused on. We report on accuracy and all the other things, but it’s really that level of cognitive stimulation that we’re really focused on, and I think uniquely placed to do this because we found something that’s just so simple that people with dementia enjoy playing and their carers really enjoy it. So we ran a clinical trial pilot in the UK, and it showed some surprising results. And the way we came to this is just after we built the app. We made a small presentation at a biotech conference in the Isle of Men. You can imagine how small that conference was. And afterwards, this woman came up to us and said, boys, you have no idea what you have here. This app can change lives and we can prove it in clinical trials.

Bruce
And we’re going, really, I mean, we’re making games for our mums. And Helen, who happened to have run eight dementia trials for Big pharma in her career, R d for NHS trusts, stepped up and said, ok, we’re just going to do this. So she developed a protocol for us, we got it approved, ethics, everything else. So RCT clinical trial ran it and I’ll just share a few of the results, a small pilot, but it’s got some interesting stuff that we’re working with ASU on now. So 58% of the carers believed the app helped the person with dementia communicate more. That was just gold and wonderful news for us. But 92% of the carers said the app taught them and the person with dementia something new.

Bruce
92% of carers felt the app made them more relaxed, 83% said it made them laugh more, 67% of the carers felt made the app made them happier. And 66% of carers felt the time spent using the app was worthwhile. Those were just wonderful validators for us. And again, because we’re focused on socialization, if the caregivers are happier and more engaged and they’re enjoying that process, they get that 13 minutes window of, you get out of the loop of, why am I here? I want to go home, where’s my husband? Those kind of loops, and we get reports of this all the time. All of a sudden, we got structured cognitive stimulation activities for 13 minutes. And then it’s joy because you’re actually having a nice conversation. You may hear memories you’ve never heard before, trigger a positive memory, foster improved communication. That’s the model.

Bruce
And then there were a couple of outliers, which are really unique insights, which my clinician tells me she knew what happened, but we didn’t. And this is something the Mayo and Arizona State University have picked up on. So small pilot. But for moderate dementia, in 92% of cases over the six months, we at least maintained the severity of their dementia. 17% showed an improvement. And we’re sitting there going that we all see the results that pharma are putting out right now. Wonderful results, but an important, really important work on a global scale. But we had games played in 134 countries last month, and it’s just enjoyment playing a game. What’s come out of this is Arizona state’s faculty of Nursing Innovation has stepped up and embraced us. They are writing our clinical trial protocol for an FDA trial right now.

Bruce
So they’ve taken our clinical trial, which they’d love the structure of here. We did it in people’s homes, pairs of carers and people with dementia in their own homes. And now they’re writing that to start a clinical trial in Q one, 2024. And the goal is to replicate those results. And wouldn’t that be wonderful if you could sit and play these games on your dad’s favorite hobby, on the town he grew up india, on his favorite kind of classic car or deciduous trees or cats and dogs, whatever it is. And that has therapeutic benefit. That’s where we’re aiming and excited to.

Pete
Mean it’s all really excellent results so far. What I’m interested in at this point is you’re talking a lot about a carer and a patient, and there’s a lot of laughs, which I quite like. A good game does make you laugh. So where if anywhere is a point in this for group games. So is it being used for groups of people in care homes and things like.

Bruce
We have. We license our platform into memory care in the US, Canada and the UK, so into care homes, and they love it in group settings. But there’s two sets of groups we think are fascinating. One is the groups of residents with the activity director at the front, and they pass around tablets, iPads and such. And some residents are helping other residents, and it’s wonderful to see that interaction. But also, let’s play a game on. In the UK, many of the care staff are Filipino. And so we’ve got 250 games on the Philippines because we worked with their national Alzheimer’s association to co design the app in the early days, and so they can share a bit of their culture of philippine street foods and then play some british food games as well. So there’s some cross cultural sharing.

Bruce
But the other thing we’re seeing, we’ve shown in our clinical trial, is intergenerational play. So finally, there’s a way for the grandkids to engage with grandma, who has dementia, because those conversations are always a little scary and can be a little tough. But here they start playing the game, and we’ve seen documented examples where the grandmother says, come on over, I’ll show you how my game works. And isn’t that incredible?

Ben
So, going back to what you mentioned earlier, when you were presenting to the Mayo Clinic and the clinical team there, and almost to a point, initially ridiculed the idea that a game could make a difference. You’ve mentioned about the clinical trials you’ve got lined up. What challenges have you had just trying to convince clinicians or health systems that games can and are know?

Bruce
When we first sat down at the Mayo Clinic, we kind of barged our way in to the accelerator. It was our first Us business trip into Phoenix. We were introduced to someone at the Mayo, and they said, yes, the accelerator is closed, but, okay, why don’t you send something in? So the next thing I know, I’m pitching to 20 people in green smocks on Zoom from the Mayo and ASU. And what we found is two things. Everyone on the call had been touched by Alzheimer’s and dementia at some point. And so there was a warmth from that. Then there was the clinical rigor. It’s tough in that audience, right? But every. We had 40 this. The Mayo and ASU accelerator was incredible.

Bruce
I had 41 one meetings with over two weeks with the leading Alzheimer’s, dementia, computerized cognitive rehab, clinical innovation, professors and researchers over two weeks and they all start just shaking their heads and then they start playing our games and they enjoy them and then they start telling a story and then they go, oh my gosh. When the judges awarded us, and this was nine startups from all over the world were selected for their potential to transform health at this. And they described us as the. It was in March, they said it was the March madness, Cinderella, underdogs of the accelerator, memory lane games. We get that a know because they think really? But the judges said, we haven’t seen anything this simple yet, this scalable that could touch millions. And that’s why we won.

Bruce
And they loved the UX, they loved that people with dementia actually enjoy this activity. And then you start to build in therapeutic side and everyone loves the story of the pub.

Ben
So in that case, you’ve already demonstrated huge scale, I mean, 100,000 downloads, 130 countries. What is your model to keep scaling? How do you make it that health systems buy this, individuals buy this. What is the model to sustain that growth and scale?

Bruce
Yeah, well, because we started out with a free app, because were just learning, right? And we wanted to get data to understand what works, what kind of content works, how our models work. We took a couple of years to do that and during COVID again, that took off and everything was wonderful. So now we’ve developed two models. One’s a SaaS business for in home care companies, memory care and hospital groups. So we’re in pilots in some large hospital groups now who are using our app to calm and distract agitated behavior. Not always on dementia wards, but in other wards where people with dementia are on and need calming. So that’s been a really interesting development just in the last little while. But we have a direct consumer family offering as well, and families we know feel the most need.

Bruce
And like us dealing with mums, you need some solutions, you need some answers. We have a monthly subscription we’ve just introduced, so it’s brand new for us.

Ben
And what’s the goal? What’s the ambition? Where’s next?

Bruce
Yeah, it’s exciting because we came from the pub to this app, to now the Mayo clinic and ASU. We want to validate, really, that playing our simple, fun, personalized games can transform the lives of both the carers and people with dementia all over the world. But when were at the Mayo, when we arrived at the accelerator, were an app for people with dementia. And when I left, were in a platform for monitoring and managing cognitive decline across neurological conditions. As the mayo said, every bed will become a hospital bed. And we think monitoring cognitive performance in people’s own homes across conditions is going to be really important as that shift happens. So I think that’s where we think that just by having activity that people love to do anyway, that we can deliver benefits right across the globe.

Bruce
Then your audience knows the solutions from the App Store, not the drugstore. We think that’s the future, and we’re thrilled our simple little solution is moving in that direction.

Ben
So I’m really interested. You mentioned earlier about the seven clinical data points that you capture around kind of accuracy, response time. What are those indicating in terms of what do you think it could be interpretated to indicate? And what’s the opportunity to flag other interventions or other support for people for these subtle indicators that may not be picked up by family members or carers?

Bruce
So my clinician and our team really believe that we can spot changes because people with dementia often play the same games over time, and that we can see with our algorithms on our seven clinical data points, a drop. And we haven’t validated these yet, but we know, could that be a UTI three weeks ahead of clinical observation? Can we get a recommendation for a pharma intervention? And those kind of things, I think, are very possible, but they’re only possible because we have engagement. People like to play our games. And once you have that, you can develop baselines, and then you can start to anticipate as you’re watching the cognitive performance levels against our data points, that we will see trends that will say, yeah, that trend. This drops off in week one, this and two, blah blah. That’s a UTI in week six.

Bruce
Okay, let’s get in week four and blah. So we think that’s, you can call it digital biomarkers. I think that’s the future.

Ben
And we’ve had other guests talk about the use of games for the potential for diagnostics. We’ve had sequest hero, which looked at spatial awareness and exploring. We’ve had grippable that looked at playing games as part of the assessment of grip strength and other indicators. One of the biggest challenges around self monitoring is that even though self assessment and self assessment tests for monitoring can be relatively simple, you answer a couple of questions, you check a few movements, maybe you palpate parts of your body. But people don’t do it often because they’re not reminded. It’s not engaging. They don’t see it as something they want to do.

Ben
I think games really could fill that gap, because suddenly, if there’s something people want to do, rather than something they’re told to do by their nurse, their doctor, their clinician, about that self assessment, how do we make it so that games are valued as potentially a diagnostic tool?

Bruce
I absolutely believe this is fundamental. You have to get the game right. It has to be fun, has to be engaging, and if you start there, then the rest can follow. But if you don’t get engagement at the beginning, you won’t have any data. And that’s always been our view that we knew that if we got the engagement, the user experience, right, but you really have to focus that gaming experience by population. So for us, people living at home with dementia, with their spouse, or with a carer who comes in once a day, or however it is, that’s our audience, and making it fun for them to shift some of those difficult conversations into a more positive reminiscence, socialization, and then what flows out of that? That’s magic. So you need to be able to create that engagement moment and measure that.

Bruce
And I think we’re seeing that we can engage hard to engage audiences. And I think that’s like, adherence, I think, is always one of the biggest challenges for any drug or any therapeutic. And I think that you need that regular use in order to develop the baselines, in order to develop your data models.

Ben
In that case, some of the pharmaceutical interventions at the moment for Alzheimer’s and dementia, where they are most effective, is the early stages of the disease itself. What’s the youngest audiences you’re seeing coming through, or what’s the earliest stages of dementia? Alzheimer’s you’re seeing come through. Is there that potential to maybe pick up people before they’re going into the latter stages of Alzheimer’s again, to flag up new medication, new interventions to reduce that degeneration?

Bruce
Well, this is exactly the model that the Alzheimer’s society and UKRi had in mind when they launched the longitude prize for dementia. 4.2 million pound prize. And were one of the 20 semifinalists. And it’s for AI technology that can adapt to individuals in their own homes to keep them living with dementia independently for longer. And so 20 companies from 20 projects from nine countries around the world were selected for that. We’re in year one of a three year project. There’s a million pound grand prize at the end, but we think that the counsel we’ve been given is, your model’s perfect, you just need some younger content, right? It’s not all Frank Sinatra, but as long as we have some younger nirvana and such, that the exact same models work and the airless learning, all of those kind of things just flow.

Bruce
And some groups have told us this is an ideal model for stroke rehab and so much younger audiences, relatively speaking. So it’s just with our gen AI models, we can adapt content relatively easily, but we’ve got this base gamification model, we think that works.

Ben
I think what fascinates so far about what memory lane games do is that it’s a relatively simple game concept, but is not about the most advanced or the most complex intervention. It’s about the most visible, most used, and most adhered to intervention. That really makes a change.

Pete
Yeah.

Ben
And I think what you’ve created, Bruce, as a team, is really delivering on that. Have you seen any other examples in the gamification world that you’ve really liked to look at, whether that’s in healthy aging or more broadly?

Bruce
Huge fan of Achilles, for example, apps for ADHD, but the way they’ve approached it with the reward system, thinking just like a true video game, that Star wars game that we all played, I think that kind of thinking of the closed loop and rewards, I think is spectacular. And I think really how it can modulate, really adapt and modulate the degree of difficulty and such, I think that’s fascinating. And the way they’ve been able to systematize that, I think is absolutely incredible. So I’m really impressed with what they’re doing. And I think if you walk into a care home now, they play games lots of time, lots of games, but it’s paper based games, or it’s still a book or a still image on a screen. It’s not interactive.

Bruce
So I think we’re kind of at that point where now we can get that interactive. I think the one thing that we’re introducing, which we think has got some magic to it, is personalized games. So you can make a game on your own family. So the first screen comes up, it’s a picture of mum when her kids were seven, eight and nine. What’s the name of your oldest son? And then the reward screen, the answer is Matthew, and it’s Matthew today. And so when he comes to visit, he’s more familiar as well. But you put those things together, the magic of that hyper personalization is now possible. We’ve got games on in just about every city in the world. We can do that. Where did you grow up? So we can bring that hyper personalization, which wasn’t possible before, to the simple engagement.

Bruce
And I think that’s where we’re going to really see. I think magic across the industry. You talk about precision medicine and such, but for me, it’s personalization really optimizes engagement the most.

Ben
Not just that, you’re right, it increases engagement. But from a family member, from a son, from a daughter, from a grandchild perspective, this is something they can do as a way to support their parent, their grandparent, as part of their symptom management, disease management, laughter, happiness, well being, socialized social connections. And so actually it becomes a tool that makes people who often feel powerless in supporting that parent or grandparent feel they can have a real avenue to support them, which I think is a brilliant concept. How do you go about that? Do you just offer the tools out to family members? What’s your steps to making it this hyper personalized solution?

Bruce
So we have a system where you import your photos, you tag a couple of questions, a couple of answers, and bang, we have a game added to a profile. So it’s fairly straightforward, but it still takes a bit of work. Anyone, you have to sit and think about which photos and take photos of photos. So we’re improving that process all the time. But let me give you an example. One fellow, our chairman, who came to us because of our app, and his mom had dementia and moderate to advanced dementia. And every time he’d visit her, she lived with his sister. It was a loop, six minute loop. What did you have for lunch? What did you have for dinner? What did you watch on tv? And the responses are often, when can I go home?

Bruce
A very negative loop every time that he would visit. And so he started playing memory lane games with her one day, got his iPad out, and she’s from Manchester. So he opens up a game on Manchester, and one of the questions is, what are the name of these beautiful gardens in Manchester? And the answer is Piccadilly. But she ignores the questions and says, do you see this tram stop here in the picture? And he goes, yes. Well, that’s where I used to meet your dad after the war, because your uncle had a shop around the corner and he didn’t get along with your dad. He had never heard that story before. So he called me after that and said, bruce, we have to talk. He joined us. He heard memories he’d never heard before. And we get those kind of comments all the time.

Bruce
But what we found, hyper personalization isn’t necessarily what you think, it’s what the person thinks. That’s why we have 3000 games where they can find something easily that they want to talk about. And that’s the kind of personalization we think is where the real magic comes from.

Pete
I got a quick question for you. Hopefully you’ve got a growing bank like 3000 games. How complex is the navigation through that? Because of your target audience.

Bruce
Yeah. So as you come into our app, you select a few interests, you select a few familiar places. It’s quite an easy process to do. The care sets it up and then boom. And then based on the games you play, really where the gameplay comes from is the next up screens. So where we present two games for you to choose instead of our 3000. And so as our engines get better and better at recommending those games, that’s how we extend that. But we’ve got wonderful games on woodworking tools. What’s the name of this tool? And because that was really popular, we made games on what wood is this piece of wood? What wood is this? And it’s really popular. People argue about what piece of wood that is. And so we can follow along those models.

Bruce
But, yeah, discovery is not easy, but our speech language therapists call it shopping, where the people with dementia are sitting down will flick through the iPad and find an image. They focus on an image in our kind of catalog, Frank Sinatra or the Ed Sullivan show or classic cars, and then they engage that way. So it’s easier than you think.

Pete
I really like the fact you just offer a choice of two after you finish the game for the next one. And I think there’s also something there, which is they are mentally committing to playing again as well when they select one, aren’t they?

Ben
Bruce, it’d be great to know where you think gamification in health or healthy aging outsummers. Where do you see it going over the next decade?

Bruce
Well, I think maybe a little contrarian to what most people, or many people in the industry think. I think a lot of very smart people are working on early detection, and we’ve talked a bit about that today, and I think that’s really important work. But for me, I think where the future of this industry can be is on that engagement. And a professor at Arizona State University described our app. Because you’ve built a tool for social cognition. I had to write that down because I wasn’t sure what that was, but I love it. But we think the power of socialization, that power of opening up and the neurons firing and the neural plasticity benefits from socialization in populations where it’s become difficult to communicate that release is, I think, transformative.

Bruce
And I think that as we get better and better, finding something that person wants to talk about, that’s where these benefits are going to come out more and more. During COVID we saw a lot of, especially people with dementia, but even more, other conditions really withdraw into themselves. Lack of social contact, social isolation, loss of confidence and resilience. And we need to bring that socialization back out. I think longer term, I think there’s ways to address loneliness and other areas with this kind of thinking of focusing on the socialization, not the scoring.

Ben
Really well put, Bruce. It’s been fantastic to have you on the show today to talk about a solution to support people living with dementia that started with the memory Lane Games co founders, creating a solution with a gamification design principle of not wanting to upset your mums, taking the idea for memory lane games from a conversation in the pub to delivering over 3000 cognitively stimulating and socializing games with over 100,000 downloads being played in over 130 countries. The importance of designing and frustration free games that include errorless learning, that promotes longer term engagement, social interaction, cognitive stimulation and empowered play. And finally, all of this resulting in more laughter, people who are happier, improved communication, relaxed intergenerational connection and the potential to improve the symptoms of dementia globally. Bruce has fantastic to have you on today.

Bruce
I’ve been thrilled to be here. This has been so much fun. Thank you so much.

Pete
It’s been great having you, Bruce.

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