Video games will be used to better understand Parkinson’s disease and build large scale neurological models.
Parkinson’s is the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s. Approximately 500,000 Americans are diagnosed with it, and its prevalence has doubled in the last 25 years, particularly for patients under age 50.
This project, funded by a 5 million dollar grant from The National Institutes of Health, will use video games to study brain function in patients with Parkinson’s.
Study participants will play a video game, before, during and after surgery, allowing the research team to see the effectiveness of the treatment in real time.
The patients’ behavioral and neurological data will also help build a large-scale mathematical model of the brain, so that theories about its function can be tested.
Convergence of gaming and medicine on this level points to the future, and specifically how these disciplines will combine to create and deploy to create medicinal media.Â
Source
https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2023/10/10/how-video-games-could-unlock-new-treatments-parkinsons
