Bingocize®: An Experimental Intervention to Improve Functional Health and Cognitive Performance in Older Adults

As the population of older adults inevitably expands, the need to develop strategies for maintaining good cognitive performance continues to increase. Reviews of the research literature show a myriad of investigations into ways to combat cognitive decline, with physical exercise interventions showing the most significant improvements in cognitive performance. Although current health promotion programs are available, they are often seen as unacceptable to older adults, which led to the design of our present program, Bingocize® This program combined exercise and health knowledge, and embedded them within the fun and familiar context of bingo. The goal of this research was to evaluate the effects of the Bingocize® program on cognitive performance and correlates of functional independence. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, by senior center location, and were tested before and after the intervention. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the study lost a significant number of participants. Given the small sample size, results should be interpreted cautiously. Of note, adherence rate thus far for Bingocize® sessions has been extremely high (\u3e85%), suggesting older adults found the intervention engaging. Findings from cognitive data indicated a main effect of Condition on strict dot-counting scores, and a main effect of Time on lenient dot-counting score. Those in exercise conditions did not improve on cognitive measures more than those who were assigned to non-exercise conditions and those in the multimodal group (BEH) did not improve more than the other unimodal groups. Future research could be improved by including a larger sample size, the addition of a social measure, and follow-up testing