Dementia-Related Serious Games: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Dementia is an incurable illness that adversely effects the cognitive functioning. Serious games for dementia (SG4D) have manifest the beneficial role in Health domain. Though, the SG4D discipline is yet unexplored and not fully categorized. As dementia is a sensitive issue, we aim to study the current literature including the usage of serious games related to dementia for providing guidelines to the researchers of this field. In this paper, we included articles on dementia related serious games having published, peer-reviewed results and being approved by experimental studies on dementia patients. This comparative study explored the serious games associated to dementia ( Big Brain Academy, Complete Brain Workout, Lumosity, MasterQuiz, Wii Fit, Wii Sports, Posit Science, Smart Brain Games, Xavix Hot Plus,), in the context of platform, distribution, input method, targeted health area, targeted audience, health game category. This comparative study shows the positive side of such games in dementia care and motivate to continue development of serious games. If these games really do work in daily life, requires advance scientific research.

Keywords

• dementia
• serious games
• gamification
• cognitive impairment