UCR. US: A video game Wisp that guides players through a dark cave may lead
combat veterans suffering blast wave damage to better hearing. The
innovative brain-training game under development at the University of
California, Riverside will begin testing on university students this
month, and may be ready for testing on veterans this summer.
UCR researchers will update potential donors on their progress at a
pizza party on Monday, Feb. 9, from 6 to 8 p.m. at The Getaway, 3615
Canyon Crest Drive, Riverside. Free pizza and soda will be available to
the first 100 people who register for the event. RSVP here. The event is sponsored by Experiment.com, a crowdfunding website the researchers are using to raise money to fund the project.
The team is seeking public support to raise the estimated $100,000
needed to fund the research and development of a computer game they
believe will improve the brain’s ability to process and distinguish
sounds. Funding generated so far through Experiment.com and the UCR Brain Game Center
has supported the development of sounds the research team believes will
revive auditory processing systems damaged by blast waves.
Tax-deductible donations may be given to the UCR Brain Game Center through UCR Online Giving;
use the “special instructions” field to designate the gift for the “Can
brain training help soldiers with brain injury regain hearing?”
project.
Many combat veterans suffer hearing loss
from blast waves that makes it difficult to understand speech in noisy
environments – a condition called auditory dysfunction – which may lead
to isolation and depression. There is no known treatment.
Building on promising brain-training research at UC Riverside related
to improving vision, researchers at UCR and the National Center for
Rehabilitative Auditory Research are developing a novel approach to
treat auditory dysfunction by training the auditory cortex to better
process complex sounds.
“This is exploratory research, which is extremely hard to fund,” said
Aaron Seitz, UCR professor of neuropsychology. “Most grants fund basic
science research. We are creating a brain-training game based on our
best understanding of auditory dysfunction. There’s enough research out
there to tell us that this is a solvable problem. These disabled
veterans are a patient population that has no other resource.”
Seitz said the research team is committed to the project regardless
of funding, but donations will accelerate development of the
brain-training game by UCR graduate and undergraduate students in
computer science and neuroscience; pilot studies on UCR students with
normal hearing; testing the game with veterans; and refining the game to
the point that it can be released for public use.
Auditory dysfunction is progressive, said Alison Smith, a graduate
student in neuroscience studying hearing loss in combat vets who is a
disabled veteran. Nearly 8 percent of combat veterans who served in
Afghanistan and Iraq suffer from traumatic brain injury, she said. Of
those, a significant number complain about difficulty understanding
speech in noisy environments, even though they show no external hearing
loss.
“Approximately 10 percent of the civilian population is at risk for
noise-induced hearing loss, and there have been more than 20,000
significant cases of hearing loss per year since 2004,” added Smith, who
served in the Army National Guard as a combat medic for five years.
This research also may help many other hearing-impaired populations,
including musicians, mechanics and machinists; reduce the effects of
age-related hearing loss; and aid individuals with hearing aids and
cochlear implants.
This month the team will begin testing on UCR students to determine
if the sounds developed for the brain-training game are relevant to
speech perception, said Dominique Simmons, a cognitive psychology
graduate student studying audiovisual speech perception. Testing will
continue through late March.
If these sounds test well, they will be incorporated into a video
game in which players move through a cave guided by a Wisp whose route
is determined by the volume and direction of these sounds.
In addition to Seitz, Smith and Simmons, team members include
Frederick J. Gallun, a researcher at the National Center for
Rehabilitative Auditory Research and associate professor in
otolaryngology and the Neuroscience Graduate Program at Oregon Health
and Science University; and Victor Zordan, UCR associate professor of computer science who specializes in video game design and intelligent systems.