Spy game to help rehabilitate veterans suffering from brain injuries.

• Author: Jean, Grace V.
• Position: TRAINING & SIMULATION

The signature wound of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars--traumatic brain injury--continues to plague thousands of troops long after they have returned from the battlefield. Many suffer from cognitive impairments including memory loss, reduced attention and concentration and slow central auditory processing speed.

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Repairing the damage is possible, neuro-psychologists say. As in physical therapy, cognitive rehabilitation is best accomplished through daily sessions over a long-term period of weeks and months. During that time, clinicians assign exercises to help treat brain injury patients. Many are computer-based drills that include memory games involving playing cards and attention tasks that, for example, require players to hit the space bar whenever the letter "A" appears in a series.

But those cognitive skill exercises do not cut it for combat veterans who grew up playing Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation video games.

"It's really hard to get them to buy into a video game that doesn't have a cool story line and graphics involved," said Kirk Little, a clinical psychologist who owns a practice in northern Kentucky. Available exercises on the Internet also lack the entertainment factor of console games and become so boring and tedious to use over time that troops eventually lose interest altogether. "It's too much of a chore, like folding your socks," Little said. Without the repeated practice, cognitive functions do not improve, neuroscientists say.

To appeal to the gaming generation, researchers are developing a trainer designed to rehabilitate brain injury patients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center through adaptive scenarios that engage them in audio and visual exercises.

"Our goal was not only to develop a tool that could be used at home, but also to help folks stick with rehabilitation," said Alexandra Geyer, senior cognitive scientist at Aptima Inc., the Woburn, Mass.-based firm that is producing the game.

The training tool, called adaptive gaming for auditory training and evaluation, or AGATE, takes participants through a series of puzzles and exercises with a spy-adventure twist to them.

"They feel like they're playing a video game," said Jason Sidman, a cognitive scientist who leads the instructional and training technologies team at the company.

In the initial phase of AGATE, a player might approach a briefcase with a keypad lock on it. A code is verbally given to him through an earpiece and he has to...