Senior adults at the Mayerson JCC in Cincinnati, Ohio meet with Tiffany Colucci, a licensed social worker, to use the Savion program for mental stimulation. Tsippy Gottlieb, JCC director of senior services, learned about Savion at the ASA/ NCOA conference in Chicago in 2007. Savion is a computer program of cognitive exercises developed by an occupational therapist in Israel, especially for people with dementia. When Gottlieb heard the presentation about Savion, she quickly saw the benefit of incorporating its use into the JCC's mind/body activities for elders.
She felt this product was innovative and she wanted to be one of the first community centers to develop a senior adult intervention program using Savion in the United States. Gottlieb purchased Savion for the Mayerson JCC, developed an arena for its use, and recruited senior adults. Savion has been successfully running there for the past year and, during that time, more then 100 seniors have used it. Savion includes exercises in math, language, shapes, and memory. Its benefit is that older adults are able to receive cognitive stimulation and adapt it to their own level.
There are still those today who think that people who suffer from some form of dementia are unable to use the computer. They will say “They can’t concentrate, they don’t know what to do, and since they never used the computer before, how can they learn something new now when they are cognitively impaired?” Savion takes a different perspective. It is a computer program uniquely developed for people with dementia. There are many computer tools for cognitive assessment - but none for cognitive stimulation of people with dementia.
“At the Mayerson JCC in Cincinnati, we ask whether an improvement experienced in a brain training program will transfer to real life,” said Gottlieb. Assessments were done before and after the seniors at the JCC used Savion for 8 weeks. Results showed that those seniors experienced less of a decline in information-processing skills.
“I have noticed, on average, that as people work on the Savion tasks from week to week, their ability to perform the tasks improves, and their scores are higher than their baseline scores,” reported Tiffany Colucci, the JCC social worker who supervises the Savion program.
The Savion program was developed over ten years ago, by Yehudit Lange, Melabev's Occupational therapist, and has been used in Melabev day care centers with people with mild to severe dementia. A recent pilot research study conducted by Dr. Tzvi Dwolatsky of Ben Gurion University showed that use of the Savion program as little as 20 minutes twice a week has positive effects on the memory. Anyone interested in purchasing the program can contact 02-5833555.
