Designing Brain Training Games and Evaluating the Usability between Young and Elderly

Abstract

There is few researches focus on investigating game player's experience and preference between the young and elderly. In this study, four different braining training games designed by us are used to investigate the effects of age and game preference. In total, 136 participants were randomly selected, and they are separated into two age groups-young (N=90) and old (N=46). The experimental results demonstrate differential age effects in braining training games performance. Our results show that no matter what types of games young adults get better performance than the older adults and they all reach a significant difference. Meanwhile, due to the interface design may affect the willingness of older adults to play the game. Therefore, the usability is also studied by the design of game's control keys in a car racing game. The experimental results show that, older people respond relatively more slowly than the young people. Therefore, simpler interface design of brain training game is more suitable for older adults. In addition, the survey results indicated that the fruit catching game is loved by most of old people (reached 41.2%). The main reasons are without problem-solving stress and easy to play-player only need to control the right and left arrow keys. In other words, no psychological burden and simple interface design are the key factors in design popular games for elderly. However, young group is more like car racing game than others (28.6%). Since it is a playable game and they get a feeling of satisfaction when they reach a lower lap time. Finally, the brain age reference diagrams for the four developed games are proposed. Players can use these diagrams to understand their capability with respect to young and old group.