Design and evaluation of an intergenerational gaming platform for cognitive stimulation

Abstract

Cognitive stimulation therapies based on games are commonly used nowadays in care centers for people suffering from Alzheimer's or other cognitive diseases. Although users usually like the proposed games, they are not motivated enough to play willingly on a regular basis. This work presents a novel game platform for cognitive stimulation that introduces the factor of intergenerational interaction in order to increase user’s motivation towards playing. This work tries to involve patient’s relatives in the gaming experience by including the use of social networks. The presented gaming platform has been designed, implemented and evaluated with real patients, proving its technical feasibility and usability. Evaluation results and practitioners’ experience show that the gaming platform will be more suitable for patients suffering from a mild level of cognitive disease.

Keywords

• intergenerational games
• cognitive disease
• usability