WKU News

Less than 1 percent of college students in the United States get to work on research funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Some WKU students are in that 1 percent and WKU’s Amy Bingham shows us the kind of research they’re working on in this week’s View from the Hill.

By now you may have heard of Bingocize (combining exercise with the game of bingo). It was founded by a WKU faculty member in 2011 and copyrighted a few years later. An NIH-funded research grant is allowing students a unique opportunity to collect data from older adults using the Bingocize app.

“This was a really really exciting opportunity to be involved in research.”

Graduate student Deven Blake came to WKU because she knew the NIH grant presented the opportunity of a lifetime.

“It has given me so much of a foundation for research, research practices.”

Deven and her classmates are following up with residents who have engaged in Bingocize classes twice a week all semester.

“What my team of students does, and they are critical to this, I mean we absolutely can’t do it with them, my students go out there at the beginning of the twelve weeks and again at the end.

“We have physical testing, cognitive testing and then the questionnaire that we get a lot of data from there.”

Resident Katie Smith says she has seen improvement in her strength and flexibility.

“Bingocize includes doing exercise for every part of your body.”

“Otherwise you could find yourself just sitting at a table not really anything but using your hand each day.”

The data collected will investigate the effectiveness of the Bingocize app developed for tablets and phones.

“This is one huge huge giant study that takes psychological sciences and exercise science so we’re measuring  all this stuff and I’ve never been a part of something that has so many moving parts.”

Hands-on experience you won’t find in the classroom.

“This kind of opportunity was exceptionally rare especially in this area of Kentucky there aren’t that many grants funding this kind of health promotion research.”

The students travel across Kentucky and Tennessee collecting data. Dr. Shake says it’s exciting to coordinate students across different disciplines because that mimics the real world.

More: Center for Applied Science in Health and Aging