Clover Health, a healthcare technology company, is using the MindMate app and its brain games to help people stave off brain decline.
Dementia affects more than 60 million Americans. And today, on Christmas day, many will realize at family gatherings that their elderly relatives have gotten worse at remembering things. I know this well, as my 85-year-old mother has dementia, a memory loss disease that can lead to Alzheimer’s.
I’ve been spending some time talking to experts about it, and how we can turn to technology, medicine, or even games to stave off what seems inevitable as our bodies start to outlive our minds. Too often, I’ve found that tech products have been designed without the needs of older people in mind.
Clover Health, a health care technology company with a mission of helping its members live their healthiest lives, is one of the companies trying to improve mental skills for the elderly. They recently established a partnership with the team at MindMate App. The app combines brain games, healthy nutrition, regular exercise, and social interaction. It encourages its users to make multifaceted, holistic lifestyle changes to help stave off the effects of cognitive decline.
I spoke with Matt Waellert, chief behavioral officer at Clover Health, about Clover’s approach of using a proprietary technology platform to collect, structure, and analyze health and behavioral data to improve medical outcomes and lower costs for patients. Through its partnership with MindMate, Clover is able to monitor participating member’s app activity and alert the Clover care team of any significant decline in cognitive performance. This can significantly improve health care providers’ and caregivers’ ability to recognize Alzheimer’s, stroke, dementia, and other neurological disorders early, Waellert said.
I’m sure that’s interesting for a lot of people. But I had a good conversation with Waellert, in part because we wandered all over the landscape of what it means to deal with the aging of our brains. I hope you enjoy it, and Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: Tell me more about MindMate.
Matt Waellert: It’s a company we’ve started spending more time with. We’re launching a little partnership and exploring how gaming can help our members and power some interesting interventions.
GamesBeat: My own mother, who’s 85 years old, has dementia. It’s a very relevant topic for me personally.
Waellert: Absolutely. I was talking to someone at Clover about this the other day. It’s so relevant as we go into the holidays. This is when a lot of people come home for the holidays and see some of their relatives they haven’t seen in a while. They may not have realized how much has changed since the last time they saw that person.
That’s one of the reasons we’re excited about our work with MindMate. If we can do that early detection, so you don’t show up for Christmas and suddenly realize that she isn’t mentally where you thought she was — if we can detect that earlier on and start to coordinate some of that social support, it can be a real benefit to families.
GamesBeat: How do you do that?
Waellert: MindMate is a brain games-focused app. It’s pretty engaging. One of the things I liked — if you look at the average health app, it’s about 3.5-minute session times. They’re not very engaging. MindMate is more like a 16-minute session length, much more like a mobile game.
That entertainment focus is interesting for me as a scientist, because one of the dominant problems has always been how you motivate people to do things. With MindMate, they’re doing the motivation. We can piggyback on the data. People play three to five times a week for 16 minutes at a time. That generates a lot of cognitive data that we can then use to benchmark someone against themselves. We can see if you’re declining over time. That might be a sign that you need to have one of our nurse practitioners have a conversation to check what’s going on as we go along.
The app is pitched like a lot of brain game apps. Memory, reaction time, all of those things people actually like doing on their phones. They’re fun. If you look a lot of modern games, they’re just presentation layers on top of very traditional game mechanics. Those mechanics yield interesting data. The app feels very traditionally like a game, but because games stretch our minds, it does provide good cognitive data.
GamesBeat: I wonder about gamers’ mental decline over time. Everyone likes to point out that I’ve been playing Call of Duty for years, but my reaction time is so much worse now that I can’t beat the kids who shoot me online.
