Interesting article about FreeCell being used to measure cognitive ability in the elderly:
Highlights:
FreeCell, the Solitaire-like card game that comes with Windows (and elsewhere), is not a waste of time--it's therapeutic.
"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.
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