Developing a serious game for the elderly to do physical and cognitive hybrid activities

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to develop a serious game to stimulate older adults' cognitive and physical functions in which the processing speed, short-term memory, working memory, and eye-hand coordination are significantly declined with age. We utilize sensors, a microcontroller, gaming technologies to create a cost effective serious game. The modular design allows it to be extended or modified easily and rapidly according to the subject's profile of cognitive and physical abilities, and also could be used as an outcome measure of cognitive training. The serious game consists of a motion-sensing controller, a rhythm game and a cognitive skills evaluation approach. First, to interact with our serious game, the elderly players are asked to perform physical actions like acupressure points' slapping to activate the motion sensing controller. Second, they need to overcome challenges from the rhythm game. The challenges are composed of three game scenarios and each one can activate a specific cognitive skill like response speed, short-term memory or working memory. During the game's playing, the serious game will record the elderly's gameplay data. With this data, we propose a gameplay data analysis approach to evaluate the elderly players' cognitive skills in short-term memory and working memory. Finally, we conducted an experiment to test the feasibility and discover phenomena which may be helpful in the improvement of our serious game in future.