Acquired Brain Injury Service

The ESC has provided £17,500 of funding into research for which computer games are pivotal to the project.

Headed by Dr Kupshik, the clinical psychologist at Bedfordshire’s Acquired Brain Injury Service, the research aims to discover a new approach to neurological rehabilitation programmes. Studies so far have shown that when using one of the Sims games donated by Electronic Arts, a patient who had become withdrawn and depressed, having been told he would never drive again, began to take more of an interest in life.

Conventional programmes can be dull, seem irrelevant to the patient’s world, be difficult to follow and therefore demoralising. Playing the game involves the patient building up a family within a house, organising its daily routine within a budget and doing all this while taking into account the characters’ emotions.  Players become completely absorbed and Dr Kupshik thinks that patients can begin to get an idea of everyday life once more, learn new skills, develop short-term memory and begin to solve problems – all of this, crucially, on a manageable scale, since The Sims is simple to understand, fun and gently paced.

ABIS units are scarce; Dr Kupshik estimates that for every ten hospitals in the country there is one brain injury service coping with the million patients each year in the UK, 4,000 of whom will need ongoing support. Physical healing is just one side of the problem and patients discharged without sufficient neurological rehabilitation can drift into depression, a hallmark of such injuries. Typically they lack confidence, partly because family relationships alter during the hospital stay and partly because without employment they have no routine and no motivation. Often patients find it hard to concentrate for more than a couple of minutes, remember things or learn anything new.

With our donation Dr Kupshik can now take his research into computer games further. He can employ a research assistant to test this observation properly in a year-long trial on up to 40 patients and, if successful, this could lead to a wider study and hopefully to another tool for psychologists dealing with rehabilitation.

The ESC has made a three-year commitment to donating £120,000 to Whizz Kidz, the largest charity in the UK supplying mobility equipment to children. click for more

The ESC has made a three-year commitment to donating £120,000 to Whizz Kidz, the largest charity in the UK supplying mobility equipment to children. click for more

On the Run! Join the ESCapees on the Asics Reading Half-Marathon on April 9th 2006 and raise funds for the ESC