Design & Development of Brain Game Center Infrastructure

About This Grant

SUMMARY This project seeks to support Research Software Engineer (RSE) Katherine Acevedo’s efforts to develop open science tools to better measure and train cognition. Acevedo is currently the Director of Development at the Brain Game Center for Mental Fitness and Well-Being and in this role supports a range of NIA-funded projects aimed at developing both assessment and interventional materials to advance the understanding cognitive aging, identifying early-stage behavioral biomarkers of ADRD, and promoting cognitive reserve. This work is demonstrated in the following funded projects: U19AG066567 (CoI: Seitz), R01 AG076157 (PIs: Green, Jaeggi & Seitz), R21AG069428 (PIs: Jaeggi & Seitz), R01MH111742 (PIs: Jaeggi & Seitz), R01AG077725 (PIs: Koener & Seitz), R01AG063952 (Green, Jaeggi, & Seitz), R61/R33AG073668 (Jaeggi & Seitz), R01EY031226 (PIs: Seitz & Green), and R21/R33AG074497 (Anguera, Jaeggi, & Seitz). Acevedo leads development of the Portable Adaptive Rapid Testing (PART) software application that supports these projects. The PART system is available on the Apple and Google Play stores, and currently has over 100 measures that address hearing, vision, cognitive control and executive functions, and decision making. It includes measures that are typically used in basic research, but it also includes standard neuropsychological measures and those that are used for clinical research studies. PART contributes a number of novel measures that don’t exist in platforms (such as NIH Toolbox, TabCat, or Mobile Toolbox), particularly measures of central auditory and visual processes. Further, a unique strength of the PART platform is its high degree of configurability, which facilitates the development of new tasks, refinement of existing tasks, adapting tasks to diverse populations, and also allows testing how variants of task structure impact psychometric properties of common tasks. PART is rapidly emerging as a key tool to support open science and Acevedo has been designing systems to promote the ability of researchers and students to more easily, flexibly, develop their own studies, and even tasks in PART. As such PART plays a unique role in cognitive tool sharing as most other cognitive assessment or intervention systems have limited customizability, whereas with PART is one can change the look, feel, language, and many task parameters in order to reach diverse population that have different cognitive needs. Securing dedicated funding for the Acevedo will provide critical support to focus development efforts on advancing the software architecture of the BGC’s apps to promote platform sharing and to promote open science.