One common theme connects a 75-year-old resident in an assisted living community with a 50-year-old at the height of their independent professional career: a driving desire to help our brains keep up with our aging bodies.
Building community brain health with Thinkie
Through their partnership with Thinkie, Fairwinds – Brittany Park, a senior living community in Woodinville, WA, provides state-of-the-art cognitive training technology to help residents improve their memory and other cognitive functions.
After an initial presentation to residents about the safety, efficacy, and scientific research behind Thinkie, Fairwinds – Brittany Park chose to make Thinkie available to residents in both group and individual settings.
Regularly scheduled “Thinkie Sessions”, held in a community common area, provide residents a built-in space to create and practice a healthy brain routine and to discuss brain health in a group setting.
The group setting has been key to Thinkie's success at Fairwinds – Brittany Park. Some users have noticed that their Thinkie Points scored during for some games tend to be lower on days when they’ve had extra caffeine. Indeed, caffeine does tend to reduce cerebral blood-flow,1 and has a wide range of cognitive effects on different people in different circumstances.2,3
Thinkie prompts and encourages these science-based conversations about how different lifestyle choices can affect our cognitive health over time.
The benefits of regular use by Fairwinds – Brittany Park residents
Apart from sparking healthy conversation, regular use of the Thinkie System is shown to improve working and episodic memory, as well as boost attention-switching and mental processing speed.
Those residents who prefer to use Thinkie alone can check out a sensor for use in their own apartments. Others prefer to maintain their training habits in the morning in a group setting alongside peers, coffee, and breakfast.
Whether playing Thinkie alone or in a group, about 10-15 minutes is plenty of time for most anyone to achieve their daily and weekly goals. After only four weeks of meeting those goals, users have seen remarkable improvements in key indicators of brain health.
Self-discovery using Brain Meter
The Thinkie App includes 19 brain games that were developed by world-renowned scientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima – but not everyone loves video games. In that case, the Thinkie Brain Meter allows you to pursue your cognitive training in any format and setting you may desire.
Brain Meter allows users to incorporate the Thinkie sensor while conducting virtually any offline activity, such as creating art (painting, pottery, sculpting – you name it), playing a musical instrument, or playing group and individual games such as chess and bingo or crossword and jigsaw puzzles.
These activities and countless others hold the expectation of helping keep your brain active. But do you really know what your distinct brain needs overall, much less on on any given day? The Thinkie System shows you in real-time how a puzzle, game, or project is stimulating and activating your unique prefrontal cortex.
Every brain is different, and Thinkie helps you train your brain at any age!
Read more about how Fairwinds – Brittany Park employs Thinkie to improve their residents' brain health.
1 Effects of caffeine on cerebral blood flow