Evaluation of CogWorldTravel: A Serious Game for Cognitive Screening

Abstract

As the world population is growing older, there is an urge to develop new technologies to support older adults, who are at a greater risk for the onset of dementia. Cognitive Screening Instruments (CSIs) can be used to screen for dementia. While there are a significant number of available well-researched and accepted CSIs, they are associated with drawbacks. Serious games have been investigated as an alternative instrument to overcome the constraints of traditional methods. The use of serious games for cognitive screening is still a relatively new field of research, with previous works mostly focusing on finding out whether there is a correlation or not between games and cognitive performance. Serious games that engage older adults and meet the criteria of CSIs remain an open challenge. To address this challenge, we developed CogWorldTravel, a serious game for the cognitive screening of older adults. In this paper, we describe the results of the evaluation of CogWorldTravel, which consisted of conducting semi-structured interviews with five experts in dementia assessment. Results suggest that the game involves recognition memory, attention, working memory, language, immediate memory span, processing speed, inhibition, recognition of emotions, visuoconstructional, perceptual-motor, and planning abilities.