Supporting elderly people's cognitive rehabilitation with iPad based serious games

Abstract

The system described in this document consists in the design, development and evaluation of Serious Games/activities for the cognitive rehabilitation and entertainment of elderly people. The main objective of the system is to help this group improve some of their skills, such as spatial vision, memory or attention using puzzles and bingo activities. The mental effort required for assembling the pictures acts as a stimulus to sharpen those abilities, and by playing they increase their attention skills. The set of games monitor all the steps taken by the players, showing them different activities developed for multitouch platforms. The system was tested on a group of 20 seniors. The values obtained indicated some differences between the proposed related to the time used to complete the task and the level of difficulty being the bingo less accepted (only 6 wanted to continue with the highest levels of this activity). Thus, they have less problems with spatial vision than with reading speed or attention.