Cognitive Therapy Tools for Clinicians to Manage Schizophrenia, Dementia or ADHD

HappyNeuron Pro can assist patients presenting with a variety of symptoms through structured activities centered around cognitive remediation. Along with therapy, these activities work to help patients and clinicians develop and test strategies to manage symptoms and improve the patient’s performance in daily life.

Thanks to its advanced results unit, HappyNeuron Pro is a reliable follow up tool for healthcare professionals. It allows users to track progression over time and adjust the difficulty level of activities to match ability and treatment progression. Difficulty adjustment is a major feature not only because it is necessary to increase the difficulty in order to challenge the patient and highlight improvements, but also because it is important not to lead the patient to a demotivating failure.

The results unit can also be used to detect positive or negative changes in patients; for example, by means of improvement in reaction time or a fall in performance.

HappyNeuron Pro can be particularly useful for different types of therapy. Below are a few examples:

Left Stroke

The left side of the brain is known to control language abilities in 88% of right-handed people and in 78% of left-handed people. This means that in a major part of left side stroke cases, language and memory are affected as well as attentional control, executive functions and visual abilities such as facial recognition, depending on the spot of the stroke. Aphasia is a natural consequence of left side stroke and is associated with a partial or total loss of writing, oral production and/or comprehension.

Speech therapists are essential to allow those patients to come back to the typical level of communication necessary for everyday social interaction. HappyNeuron Pro can assist therapists using cognitive rehabilitation tools and activities to train and evaluate progress.

An activity such as ‘You’ve got voicemail’ is perfect for training oral comprehension abilities with simple or complex messages.

To answer questions related to the message, patients must understand oral information and memorize it with the help of their working memory. They also need to understand questions and related answers to give the right one.

To preview this cognitive rehabilitation activity and more, click here and fill out the form for a free trial.

Schizophrenia

Clinical evaluation shows evidence of negative symptoms (emotional difficulties, inability to initiate conversation) that lead to poor social activities and high dependence. Those difficulties are multiplied by low cognitive flexibility and planning, selective attention difficulties and visuospatial memory and attention issues.

Positive symptoms of schizophrenia include disorganized speech and delusional behavior. Improving the performance of executive functions like organization, planning, action inhibition and reasoning can reduce these positive symptoms, allowing increased social interaction and improvement in daily life.

The HappyNeuron Pro activity ‘Decipher’ is built to improve executive functions by engaging patients with training for reasoning by setting up new strategies to decipher text with the help of clues. To perform this activity, a patient is required to use logic and reasoning to create and shift strategies in order to reach the goal.

To preview cognitive remediation activities like ‘Decipher’ and more, click here and fill out the form for a free trial.

Dementia

Memory is one of the most affected cognitive functions in the most common types of progressive dementia: Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.

Brain structures that host memory such as the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex or frontal cortex are rapidly damaged by those pathologies. Hence, working memory and declarative memory are quickly affected. Memory improvement in patients with dementia can stimulate neuroplasticity (neurogenesis, neuronal pathway change, synapses creation) and help to prevent memory loss.

HappyNeuron Pro can assist in spatial working memory with activities like ‘Find Your Way!’

During this activity, the patient must memorize a path and reproduce it forward or backward with or without help and with few or a lot of items. In daily life, we often solicit this competence when we want to remember the path we used the last time we went to visit someone.

Spatial working memory activities such as this one can help patients with dementia that are frequently disoriented or that have difficulties remembering an object’s position in a room.

For a preview of this activity and others and to test how they can be used with your own practice, please click here and fill out the following form to start a free trial.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

How can the improvement of someone’s attention skills be used to treat ADHD?

ADHD involves 3 major symptoms:

• A deep attentional deficit (difficulty finishing a task, frequent oversights, distractibility and frequent sidestep of activities that need a high level of sustained attention).
• Motor hyperactivity even in situations in which calm is required plus disorganized and inefficient motor activity.
• Impulsivity: incapacity to wait, tendency to interrupt others.

Structured attentional functions (sustained, selective and divided attention) remediation is an interesting alternative to drug treatments for ADHD.

During the cognitive remediation therapy patients will progressively become aware of their difficulties. This new increased awareness will help them to establish the therapist cognitive strategies to efficiently accomplish daily life activities by staying focused or by focusing on a prominent element of the environment.

One example of a HappyNeuron Pro activity that helps improve a patient’s attention skills, applicable for ADHD, is ‘Gulf Stream.’

Gulf stream requires a high level of selective, sustained attention and working memory.

Patients must memorize the shape and colors of a target fish and then identify it when it passes through a diving mask. This accomplishes three main tasks:

1. This activity solicits the central executive control of working memory and the spatial sketchpad to memorize the fish during the activity.
2. A high level of sustained attention is needed to complete the activity because the therapist can decide to present a few or a lot of fish to the patient.
3. To identify the right fish, the patient must focus on details, exercising the capacity for selective attention.

These are just a few examples of common symptoms and activities provided by HappyNeuron Pro; to learn more and to get a free trial to evaluate how HappyNeuron Pro can help your patients, click here!