Cognitive Flexibility Trainer Against Chronic Pain
Pain Resilience, Mental Health & Longitudinal Tracking
The Challenge
C.BIRD's research examines cognitive flexibility, the ability to change strategy, shift attention, and adapt when rules or circumstances change, as a possible protective factor against chronic pain. The working hypothesis is that stronger cognitive flexibility may accompany more flexible brain-network responses and better pain and mental-health outcomes across pain disorders, fibromyalgia included.
If flexibility is trainable, a game could become a low-cost, non-pharmacological resilience tool for people at risk of persistent pain or already living with chronic pain.
The same app could address a second research problem: it is hard to follow patients' status continuously between clinical assessments, and symptom surveys are often left incomplete. Short daily pain, mood, function, and symptom check-ins could build a continuous longitudinal picture of each patient, while the training gives them a reason to keep returning.
The Big Idea
Can a short, replayable game train set-shifting and adaptive problem-solving without teaching someone to pass a specific clinical test? The key is that the game never announces a change. A simple mechanic might reward responding to red circles; at some point the rule quietly becomes blue, with no cue that anything has shifted. What the game trains, and measures, is how fast the player senses that their strategy has stopped working and then discovers the new rule from feedback alone. A richer version could silently change the relevant feature, action, goal, or environmental logic, so that noticing the shift and re-deriving the rule is the core challenge.
What a Jam Prototype Could Be
- A rule-discovery game inspired by the CANTAB Intra-Extra Dimensional Set Shift and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, but translated into actual play rather than copied as a test.
- Players infer a rule from feedback, build a successful strategy, then adapt when the relevant color, shape, category, goal, action, or environmental logic changes without warning.
- Set-shifting, task-switching, reversal learning, and adaptive problem-solving challenges with errors, stages completed, response time, and recovery after a rule change.
- Several mechanically different rule-shifting challenges, so improvement has a better chance of reflecting general flexibility rather than memorization of one task.
- A separate assessment mode using a genuinely held-out task the player never trained on, not just unfamiliar stimuli within the same task, so improvement is less likely to reflect practice effects.
- Daily pain, mood, and symptom check-ins wrapped into the game loop.
- A mock longitudinal dashboard showing training frequency, flexibility measures, pain, symptoms, mood, and function over time.
Design Questions
- How do you balance frustration, reward, and learning?
- How can the prototype train broad flexibility rather than a single assessment trick?
- How can changing rules feel challenging and rewarding without becoming arbitrary or making players quit from frustration?
- What should patients report quickly each day?
- Could game performance and symptom trends be viewed together?
What This Is Not
- Not a diagnosis tool, treatment order, or replacement for clinical judgment.
- Not a place to use identifiable patient data.
- Not expected to be a finished hospital product after 30 hours.
Why This Matters
A good prototype could connect game mechanics, neuroplasticity, and real-world patient follow-up in a way ordinary surveys cannot.