Humana-Posit-Science

You know your weight. And your phys­i­cal fit­ness. And a vari­ety of health-relat­ed metrics.

What about your brain fitness?

Two recent announce­ments bring out how the assess­ment of cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, or brain func­tions, is increas­ing­ly being done thanks to new com­put­er­ized options:

1) Last week, OptumHealth announced an exclu­sive 3‑year agree­ment (esti­mat­ed at $18m) with the Aus­tralian com­pa­ny Brain Resource. OptumHealth will be embed­ding the Brain Resource plat­form into their over­all Behav­ioral Solu­tions program.

- OptumHealth Behav­ioral Solu­tions will work with Brain Resource to pro­vide clin­i­cians with a Web-based assess­ment that mea­sures gen­er­al cog­ni­tion (how peo­ple process infor­ma­tion) and social cog­ni­tion (how peo­ple man­age their emo­tions). This 40-minute assess­ment is based on well-known and val­i­dat­ed tests of mem­o­ry, atten­tion, exec­u­tive func­tion, and response speed, and mood, social skills and emo­tion­al resilience.

[Read more…] about Com­put­er­ized Cog­ni­tive Assess­ments: oppor­tu­ni­ties and concerns