A Free Pass for FreeCell

I've had to explain it to the boss more than once. And finally, I have scientific backing. FreeCell, the Solitaire-like card game that comes with Windows (and elsewhere), is not a waste of time--it's therapeutic.

Okay, "therapeutic" may be stretching it a bit, considering that I've been busted three times this week for playing FreeCell at my desk. Maybe a better way of putting it is that I now consider myself part of a scientific research program like that at Oregon Health & Science University where researchers are monitoring cognitive changes in the elderly. What they've found is that when adapted with cognitive performance assessment algorithms, FreeCell may be able to distinguish between persons with memory problems and cognitively healthy seniors.

People with mild cognitive impairment are at high risk of developing dementia, which is most commonly caused by Alzheimer's disease. The discovery could help doctors plan early treatment strategies by detecting subtle cognitive changes over time in the natural setting of an elder's home.

"We discovered that we can take an existing computer game that people already have found enjoyable and extract cognitive assessment measures from it," said Holly Jimison, associate professor of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology and the study's lead author. Jimison and study co-author Misha Pavel, a professor of biomedical engineering and computer science and electrical engineering at OHSU's School of Science & Engineering, studied nine people with an average age of 80. All were regular computer users who played the FreeCell game frequently over a six-month period. Each participant was given a cognition score based on a brief battery of tests, and three were found to have mild cognitive impairment.

To measure cognitive performance, researchers compared each user's play efficiency to a game "solver" within the program that checks card layouts throughout a game and calculates the minimal number of moves to complete it. The solver is a "dynamic algorithm that is solving the game at every moment in time, and it knows the minimal number of steps you would need to complete it," Jimison said. "We compare this 'optimal slope' to how the individual users are doing."

"In general, we're trying to keep people at a 75 percent win rate," said Jimison, who also serves as senior research scientist for computer game developer Spry Learning, which received an NIST grant for helping to adapt and test the FreeCell game. "We're trying to keep difficulty at a level that keeps them motivated. We want to challenge them to the point where they just start having trouble. We don't want it to be too easy or too hard."

Right. And according to the boss I have that cognitive impairment part down pat, if not a winning strategy for FreeCell.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 12:00 PM  Permalink