Preserving attention abilities is of great concern to older adults who are motivated to maintain their quality of life. Both cognitive and physical fitness interventions have been utilized in intervention studies to assess maintenance and enhancement of attention abilities in seniors, and a coupling of these approaches is a compelling strategy to buttress both cognitive and physical health in a time- and resource-effective manner. With this perspective, we created a closed-loop, motion-capture video game (Body-Brain Trainer: BBT) that adapts a player’s cognitive and physical demands in an integrated approach, thus creating a personalized and cohesive experience across both domains. Older adults who engaged in two months of BBT improved on both physical fitness (measures of blood pressure and balance) and attention (behavioral and neural metrics of attention on a continuous performance task) outcome measures beyond that of an expectancy matched, active, placebo control group, with maintenance of improved attention performance evidenced 1 year later. Following training, the BBT group’s improvement on the attention outcome measure exceeded performance levels attained by an untrained group of 20-year olds, and showed age-equilibration of a neural signature of attention shown to decline with age: midline frontal theta power. These findings highlight the potential benefits of an integrated, cognitive-physical, closed-loop training platform as a powerful tool for both cognitive and physical enhancement in older adults.

对于有动力保持生活质量的老年人来说，保持注意力能力是非常重要的。认知和身体健康干预已被用于干预研究，以评估老年人注意力能力的维持和增强，这些方法的结合是一种以时间和资源有效的方式支持认知和身体健康的令人信服的策略。从这个角度出发，我们创建了一个闭环的动作捕捉视频游戏（Body-Brain Trainer：BBT），它以一种综合方法适应玩家的认知和身体需求，从而在这两个领域创造个性化和凝聚力的体验。参加两个月 BBT 的老年人在身体健康（血压和平衡的测量）和注意力（对连续执行任务的注意力的行为和神经指标）结果测量上都有所改善，超出了预期匹配的积极安慰剂对照组，1 年后注意力表现得到改善。训练后，BBT 组对注意力结果测量的改进超过了未经训练的 20 岁组所达到的表现水平，并显示出随着年龄增长而下降的注意力神经特征的年龄平衡：中线额叶θ功率。这些发现强调了集成的认知物理闭环训练平台作为增强老年人认知和身体能力的强大工具的潜在好处。