Neuropsychonline Weblog

The NeuroPsychOnline (NPO) Cognitive Rehabilitation Therapy System consists of six Tracks of exercises designed to improve the user’s cognitive skills. The Tracks are:

1. Attention Skills
2. Executive Skills
3. Memory Skills
4. Visuospatial Skills
5. Problem Solving Skills
6. Communication Skills

Each Track contains 12 Tasks (72 Tasks altogether), arranged in an order so that the most basic of cognitive skills are addressed first in therapy. As the user progresses, the Tasks evolve to become more complex and challenging. In addition, 69 of the Tasks contain four levels of difficulty and three contain three levels.

A therapist subscriber can operate the therapy system on an automated or a manual basis. The automated mode consists of a predetermined therapy protocol in which the patient is systematically presented with the entire therapy program in a hierarchy that we use at the Neuroscience Center and which was utilized in our research. The manual mode allows the therapist to select from a menu the exercise they want to do with a patient, in a face-to-face session, and/or set up as a prescription that includes the Tasks that the therapist wants the patient to do at home between therapy sessions. To do the latter therapists must assist their patient in converting their registration from a patient seen in the office only to a patient subscriber. There is a link under the Administration Menu within the Cognitive Rehabilitation Therapy section that will facilitate this procedure.

A prescription that the therapist could set up for a patient subscriber to do at home could contain from one to six Tasks at a time. Only one Task within a particular Track can be assigned in a prescription. A patient’s advancement through levels and also through Tasks is dependent on their performance on the Tasks. They must meet performance criteria to pass a run and they must pass on three consecutive runs to totally pass a level. Totally passing a level means that particular level will not be presented again. The patient is automatically advanced, by the system, to the next level or Task if they perform well enough on a Task. However, the therapist can always control, manually, how a patient advances through the system if they want to deviate from the established protocol.

Each task is set up in a game like format. To do therapy the patient simply plays the game and tries to do the very best they can. We have tried to make the Tasks fun to do so that therapy will be a more enjoyable experience, however, even the Tasks that are not so much fun must be completed in order for the patient’s skills to develop properly. If a patient already has some skill in a certain area and they get assigned a Task in that area they should pass through it fairly rapidly and move on to the next level.

We conduct comprehensive Therapist Training Workshops on a regular basis that teach our intended method of conducting cognitive rehabilitation therapy with the Neuropsychonline system.