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 engagement in daily life.

Thanks to its ability to provide relevant and advanced results, HappyNeuron Pro is a reliable follow up tool for healthcare professionals. It allows users to track progress 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 because it is important not to lead the patient to become demotivated due to failure.

The results provided by HappyNeuron Pro 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 clinical populations. Here are some examples of populations clinicians use our tool with:

Stroke (cerebrovascular accident)

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 attention span, executive functions and visual abilities such as facial recognition, depending on the lesion location. Aphasia is a natural consequence of left side stroke and is associated with a partial or total loss of verbal and written language abilites.

Speech therapists are essential to assisting stroke patients to regain the communication skills necessary for everyday social interaction. HappyNeuron Pro can assist therapists using providing cognitive rehabilitation to clients by providing a digital platform that can be used to practice relevant cognitive skills and generate automatic reports of progress or decline.

An activity HappyNeuron Pro offers for  auditory comprehension and memory skill practice is called ‘You’ve got voicemail’ . This exercise is perfect for training oral comprehension abilities with simple or complex messages.

In the exercise, questions are presented regarding the message participants have just heard. They must understand the oral information and develop strategies to memorize the information presented using their working memory. They also need to understand the questions being asked and the answers to choose the right one.

To try this cognitive rehabilitation activity and more, click here to try a sample of our exercises now!

Schizophrenia

Clinical evaluation shows the impact of negative and positive symptoms experienced by those with schizophrenia. Negative symptoms, which include emotional difficulties, inability to initiate conversation and depression, lead to poor social engagement. These difficulties can be amplified when clients with schizophrenia have co-morbid cognitive impairments. Some cognitive complications of schizophrenia include cognitive flexibility and planning, selective attention, visuo-spatial skill and attention deficits.

Positive symptoms of schizophrenia include disorganized speech, mania, and delusional behavior. Improving the performance of executive functions like organization, planning, inhibition and reasoning can reduce the behavioral complications of positive symptoms, allowing improved social interaction and connection with others in daily life.

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

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

How can HappyNeuron Pro be used to assist with the improvement of someone’s attention skills with ADHD?

ADHD involves 3 major symptoms:

• Pronounced attention deficits (difficulty finishing a task, frequent oversights, distraction and frequent sidestep of activities that need a high level of sustained attention).
• High energy causing hyperactivity. This is detrimental in situations in where restraint and calmness are required. Motor skills are disorganized and inefficient when targeted in an activity like team sports. 
• Impulsiveness characterized by the incapacity to wait and tendency to interrupt others during conversation.

Structured attention skills which include sustained, selective and divided attention can be improved with cognitive remediation therapy. This approach is an interesting and beneficial option for clients of all ages. 

During the cognitive remediation therapy, a therapist works with patients to help them progressively become aware of their difficulties. This increased awareness will help clients establish cognitive strategies to efficiently accomplish daily life activities, such as staying focused on a task. 

One widely used HappyNeuron Pro activity that can help improve a patients with ADHD develop strategies to improve attention skills is ‘Gulf Stream.’ ‘Gulf Stream’ requires both high levels of selective and sustained attention coupled with working memory.

In this exercise, patients must memorize the shape and colors of target fish and then identify them when they pass through a diving mask. This accomplishes three main tasks:

1. Soliciting executive control of working memory and using the spatial sketchpad to memorize the fish during the activity.
2. Demanding high levels of sustained attention in order to complete the activity because the therapist can decide to present a few or a lot of fish to the patient.
3.  Attention to detail,  in order identify the right fish, clients must        exercise their selective attention capacity. 

These are just a few examples of clinical populations HappyNeuron Pro serves and the activities provided by HappyNeuron Pro that can be used during therapy. To learn more about HappyNeuron Pro and try it for free with your clients, click here to get a 15 day free trial!