Top High­lights from The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2009 Report

1. Growth mar­ket: Con­sumers, seniors’ com­mu­ni­ties and insur­ance providers drove year on year sus­tained growth, from $225m in 2007 to $265m in 2008. Rev­enues may reach between $1 bil­lion to $5 bil­lion by 2015, depend­ing on how impor­tant prob­lems (Pub­lic Aware­ness, Nav­i­gat­ing Claims, Research, Health Cul­ture, Lack of Assess­ment) are addressed.

2. Increased inter­est and con­fu­sion: 61% of respon­dents Strongly Agree with the state­ment “Address­ing cog­ni­tive and brain health should be a health­care pri­or­ity.” But, 65% Agree/Strongly Agree “I don’t really know what to expect from prod­ucts mak­ing brain claims.”

3. Invest­ment in R&D seeds future growth: Land­mark invest­ments by insur­ance providers and government-funded research insti­tutes test­ing new brain fit­ness appli­ca­tions planted new seeds for future growth.

4. Becom­ing stan­dard in res­i­den­tial facil­i­ties: Over 700 res­i­den­tial facil­i­ties – mostly Inde­pen­dent and Assisted Liv­ing facil­i­ties and CCRCs – have installed com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing programs.

5. Cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion: Con­sumers seem more sat­is­fied with computer-based prod­ucts than paper-based options. But, sat­is­fac­tion dif­fers by prod­uct. When asked “I got real value for my money”, results were as fol­lows: Lumosity.com (65% Agree), Puz­zle Books (60%), Posit Sci­ence (52%), Nin­tendo (51%) agreed. Posit Sci­ence (53% Agree) and Lumosity.com (51%) do bet­ter than Puz­zle Books (39%) and Nin­tendo (38%) at “I have seen the results I wanted.”

6. Assess­ments: Increas­ing adop­tion of computer-based cog­ni­tive assess­ments to base­line and track cog­ni­tive func­tions over time in mil­i­tary, sports, and clin­i­cal con­texts. The Alzheimer’s Foun­da­tion of Amer­ica now advo­cates for wide­spread cog­ni­tive screen­ings after 65–75.

7. Spe­cific com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing and videogames have been shown to improve brain func­tions, but the key ques­tions are, “Which ones”, and “Who needs what when?”

8. Aggres­sive mar­ket­ing claims are cre­at­ing con­fu­sion and skep­ti­cism, result­ing in a dis­tract­ing con­tro­versy between two mis­lead­ing extremes: (a) “buy­ing prod­uct XYZ can reju­ve­nate your brain Y years” or (b) “those prod­ucts don’t work; just do one more cross­word puz­zle.” The upcom­ing book The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness aims to help con­sumers nav­i­gate these claims.

9. Devel­op­ers can be clas­si­fied into four groups, based on our Mar­ket and Research Momen­tum analy­sis: we find 4 Lead­ers, 8 High Poten­tials, 3 Cross­words 2.0, and 6 Wait & See com­pa­nies.

10. Increased dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion: Lead­ing com­pa­nies are bet­ter defin­ing their value propo­si­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels to reach spe­cific seg­ments such as retire­ment com­mu­ni­ties, schools, or health­care providers.

And much more…See the Table of Contents

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