Gaming Makes Grown-Ups Safer Drivers

Oct. 10, 2008 -- It's about as different from Grand Theft Auto as you can get.

Last week, insurance provider Allstate sent video games to 100,000 drivers aged 50 to 75 in Pennsylvania. The set of five games, together called InSight and made by Posit Science, are designed to improve the mental acuity of older drivers.

Allstate hopes the pilot program will give customers a more favorable impression of the insurance provider and turn older drivers into safer drivers.

"We expect to see that the group using the software will have a lower frequency of crashes verses the group that didn't use the software," said Tom Warden of Allstate.

Brain training is not a new idea. Japanese game maker Nintendo briefly marketed games designed to reverse certain effects of aging, but they were never scientifically proven to work. Nintendo has since announced that they stopped making brain-training games.

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Allstate and Posit say they have science on their side. Ten hours of game play turns the clock back 10 years in terms of memory, useful field of view, processing visual information, and general cognitive functions, say both companies.

Increased mental acuity leads to safer drivers. Studies, some 20 years old, funded by the National Institutes of Health and conducted at the University of Alabama show that similar video games cut the risk of a crash by 50 percent.

The training doesn't only make better drivers, but "it raises the overall quality of life," said Warden. "The benefits are not just in physical activities like driving a car, but also in remembering things more often to have fewer senior moments."