A driving game our parents can play on their own TV, with the phone as the steering wheel.
It opens on the game: a red car on a road, a stop sign coming up, and two hands holding a phone sideways. The phone shows two big buttons, a red Stop and a green Go, and tilting it steers the car.
Then the reason for a driving game. In 2013, scientists at UC San Francisco had people aged 60 to 85 play one for about 12 hours over a month, and afterwards they beat 20-year-olds playing it for the first time. The video shows the study in Nature, its news coverage from Science and NBC to AARP, and the later FDA clearance of a game built on that research. It's not medical advice; it's why we picked driving.
Then how to get there on BoomerOS, the simple TV home screen we're building for our parents: Activities, Games, Drive, and Start driving. A complicated game controller for comparison, then the game itself: stopping at a red light, waiting for green, and stopping for a giant pedestrian.
It ends on the next idea, a little memory quiz (what street did you just pass?), and a question: would your parents play this? More on BoomerOS.
There is also a shorter version, from 29 October, that puts the study first and shows YouTube and Netflix on the same TV.
Transcript
Bet your parents' TV can't do this.
Most people don't know this,
but a driving game can help make older brains sharper.
Back in 2013, scientists at UC San Francisco
had people aged 60 to 85 play a driving game,
about 12 hours over a month.
Afterwards, they beat 20-year-olds
playing it for the first time.
Six months later, it had stuck,
and their attention and memory got better too.
It made headlines everywhere, even AARP.
That same research later became the first video game
the FDA cleared as treatment.
Since I didn't have access to the treatment,
I'm not even sure how to get it,
I asked AI to build my parents their own version.
BoomerOS is the simple TV system we built for our parents.
It could be a good way to keep your senior parents
engaged in an easier way than playing a Nintendo Switch,
which is not very easy to use.
So basically we have to hold the phone sideways like a wheel.
So this is actually a very simple game
where you can kind of see if I tilt side to side, I go,
and then it's just a stop and a go.
Oh, that's a red.
So let me stop at the line.
Stop.
I'm good at this game.
Oh, I got to wait.
There we go.
And also, I was also thinking about putting a little quiz.
So it's like, oh, what street did you pass?
Oh, we don't want to hit this guy.
This guy's giant.
Or maybe, oh, what color shirt was that guy wearing?
Would your parents play this?
Tell me in the comments.