Computer games' rise in elder care tipped

Computer games to stimulate, monitor and aid the elderly will become more central to providing care as the population ages, Norway-based computer scientist Dr Simon McCallum says.

Dr McCallum, who studied to PhD level at the University of Otago, said the growing importance of computer programming in health care was another reason to support funding a neurosurgery research unit in Dunedin.

The Neurological Foundation and the University of Otago are jointly fundraising for $3 million for the research unit, which will hire a neurosurgery professor, who will also work at Dunedin Hospital.

That person will be the city's third neurosurgeon, ensuring a safe level of staffing for the southern node of the South Island service.

Dr McCallum, who said he probably would have taken Otago's neuroscience degree had it been available when he started tertiary study in 1993, said Otago had strong neuroscience, computer science and psychology departments, making it a good base for researching health care and brain applications.

"We've got all of the foundations for [the neurosurgery unit], so we're just going to put it on top of all the other things we have."

Dr McCallum's PhD focused on the function of REM sleep, and he said this illustrated how disciplines like neuroscience and computer science overlapped.

Recently, he helped a postgraduate student, at Gjovik University College in Norway, to develop and test "reminiscence games" for those with dementia. The games work with the tendency for those with dementia to remember their earlier experiences better than recent ones.

The games were shown to slow the development of dementia, and were delivered on "tablet" or mini-computers.

The games had needed to be simple enough for people to pick up and use straight away.

Because of the lack of short-term memory in dementia patients, they could not require ongoing learning to use, because patients probably only remembered what happened that day.

As health care costs increased, fewer nurses would be employed, and computers would become more important, Dr McCallum said.

The games could be developed to pick up early signs of aneurysms or other brain disorders, he said.

The ageing population created demand for resources to keep people's brains active.

Western medicine was good at keeping people's bodies alive, but understood too little about the brain.

"It seems a waste to spend all this energy giving them transplants, new organs, expensive medicines keeping their body alive and then ignoring their brain. Ignoring the bit that is them, really."

He is visiting Dunedin with his family until April, and has volunteered to assist with preparations for the International Science Festival, to be held in the middle of this year in Dunedin.

He plans to develop a computer game especially for the festival illustrating brain blood flow.

eileen.goodwin@odt.co.nz