Challenging Our Minds Weblog

The Administrator’s Module is available via a facility level subscription to COM. This module allows the facility to keep a roster of students, to which they can Add new students, Edit student profiles, View their roster to get information such as student usernames and passwords, Select specific students from the roster for the purpose of creating and printing Progress Reports and performance Data Tables and perform an Administrative Preview of any level of any exercise in the COM system. The Administrator’s Module is automatically personalized to the facility and displays the name of the facility at center screen. The process of Adding a new student brings up a Student Subscription Registration Panel to facilitate enrollment of the student into the COM system. The student performance reports, automatically generated by our system when you request (by selecting a student and clicking a button in the Charting menu), are detailed and formatted for printing.

(click on the images below to see an enlarged version)

Once you login to COM, you will receive a screen containing a Go button along with a chrome panel with seven little television like monitors. There is a monitor for each of the seven Tracks. To do your exercises, just click the Go button. The next exercise in line will load and run for you. Once you complete the exercise you will end up on the score screen where you will get feedback about how you did. On that screen you have the option of rerunning the same exercise or clicking on Home to go back to the Go button screen. Clicking Go again will move you to the next program in your assignment and when you have completed the last program in your assignment, clicking Go will start you over at exercise one.

When you accomplish the three consecutive passes on a level and graduate from it, you will see your progress on the chrome panel monitor, on the Go button screen. There is a monitor for each Track and each monitor shows you what percentage of all of the exercises/levels in that particular Track you have completed.

COM is a collection of computerized mental tasks that require one to use their brain in very specific ways to accomplish the goal of a task. Even though the tasks are presented in a game format to make them more enjoyable, each one is designed to address focused areas of brain functioning. There are seven different types of mental tasks in the system. We refer to the different types as Tracks, so there are seven Tracks and each Track will eventually contain about twenty Tasks. Each Task has three levels of difficulty. If a person gets a high enough score on a level of a game then they will get a pass credited to that level. All scores and grades are immediately sent to the main server, located at our facility here in Indianapolis, and stored in our database. When the person gets three consecutive passes on a level (that’s three in a row) then they will graduate from that level and they will not have to do that level any more. However, if, before the person gets three in a row, they get a nopass score then the total consecutive passes drops back to zero and the count starts over. Once a person graduates all three levels of a Task then they are automatically moved up to the next Task in line for that Track.

The seven Tracks focus on the following areas of cognitive functioning:

Attention Skills
Executive Skills
Memory Skills
Visuospatial Skills
Problem Solving Skills
Communication Skills
Psychosocial Skills

In actuality, most of the tasks in all of the tracks require the joint effort of skills from more than just one of these areas, however, we have attempted to emphasize the a particular skill area in each track.

An assignment consists of one Task from each of these seven Tracks. So, every assignment has seven Tasks to be done. A person should try to at least go through an entire assignment once per day, but it would be better to do an assignment two or even three times per day, at different times, not all that much at one time. If a person cannot complete the entire assignment (i.e. one complete assignment) at one sitting, that is not a problem. The system will remember where the person left off and start them at that point the next time they login. When one whole assignment is completed the system cycles back and starts with the first task again and so on.

A person can advance on the different Tracks at different rates, they are independent of one another. Therefore, a person might move faster on a Track in their strength area but more slowly if the Track is addressing their weaker area of functioning. Our research has consistently indicated that one gets more improvement in functioning when all of the seven areas are presented together rather than just focusing on the weaker areas.