Cognitive Recovery: Apps for both Hemispheres
Stroke survivors have suffered brain injuries and deserve accessible resources to aid in their recovery. Thanks to technology, a variety of resources are attainable at the touch of a finger or even a voice command. In this blog post, I am providing a variety of cognitive exercises in the form of phone applications for you to select from depending on your personal rehabilitation needs and interests. I have downloaded and played all the apps I am recommending and personally found them to be both entertaining and cognitively engaging. Hopefully within this list you will find something appealing, enjoyable, and relatively challenging that you can play anywhere, anytime, to enhance your cognitive recovery.
Therapy for cognitive disorders varies depending on the injury location because each hemisphere of the brain has different specialized functions. Additionally, each brain hemisphere controls the opposite half of the body. This means that stroke survivors who are right side affected have suffered a left side brain injury, and those who are left side affected have suffered a right sided brain injury. Thus, the most beneficial cognitive exercises will be activities that engage the side of the brain that has been afflicted.
Right Side Brain Injuries
Phone applications I found that would benefit right sided brain injuries or function to improve creativity, imagination, emotion, music and art awareness, and spatial relationships include:
Game platform with a variety of colorful spatial reasoning games
Color by number game that helps with art awareness and creativity, and is generally relaxing
Helps with emotion regulation and self-awareness
Use spatial relationship awareness to fill a grid with different block shapes
Bubble Pop! Puzzle Game Legend
Identify color patterns and use spatial relationships to target bubbles to pop
Use spatial awareness and object identification to move cars around to clear a space
Helps with music awareness as you play some of your favorite songs
Use creative thinking and art awareness to create a paint swatch that matches an item
Use your creativity and imagination to combine items and create new ones with seemingly endless possibilities
I think the aforementioned games would also be great for those who have stroke aphasia because these are not word puzzles and may be more enjoyable. However, if you want to challenge yourself because aphasia is a result of a left sided brain injury, see the recommendations below!
Left Side Brain Injuries
Phone applications I found that would benefit left sided brain injuries or to improve logic, language, reading, number skills, memory, and analyzing information include:
Use critical thinking and vocabulary to find different word combinations
Use number skills and addition to combine tiles
A modified word cross game with themed levels that challenges your vocabulary and memory
Trivia with themed categories, and you can play against your friends and family
A classic number game that requires logical and analytical thinking
Analyze information of a story and use logic to solve puzzles
Memory, focus, mental math, problem solving, and language games in one place
This is a spin on classic word search – rather than find words from a provided list, your word search is guided by finding the answers to a prompt
Use number skills and big picture planning to arrange cards in descending order
A number skills game where you match numbers and add to 10 to clear the board
Whether you play these games sparingly or they become part of your daily routine, I hope you got something from this post. I am always inspired by the resilience of stroke survivors and I hope I was able to inspire a way to utilize phone apps to benefit your recovery.
Lauren Gorrebeeck
Heal the Brain, Recovery Specialist