Developing serious games specifically adapted to people suffering from alzheimer

  • Authors:

  • Bruno Bouchard;Frédérick Imbeault;Abdenour Bouzouane;Bob-Antoine J. Menelas

  • Affiliations:

  • LIARA Laboratory, Université du Quebecà Chicoutimi (UQAC), Saguenay, QC, Canada;LIARA Laboratory, Université du Quebecà Chicoutimi (UQAC), Saguenay, QC, Canada;LIARA Laboratory, Université du Quebecà Chicoutimi (UQAC), Saguenay, QC, Canada;LIARA Laboratory, Université du Quebecà Chicoutimi (UQAC), Saguenay, QC, Canada

  • Venue:
  • SGDA'12 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Serious Games Development and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

To face new challenges caused by society aging, several researchers have initiated the experimentation of serious games as a re-education platform to help slowing down the decline of people suffering from Alzheimer. In the last few years, academic studies have been conducted and some commercial products (Nintendo's Brain Age, Big Brain Academy, etc.) have emerged. Nevertheless, these initiatives suffer from multiple important limitations since they do not really suit perceptual and interaction needs of silver-aged gamers, more specifically people suffering from Alzheimer disease. In an effort to address this important issue, we present in this paper a set of specific guidelines for designing and implementing effective serious games targeting silver-aged and Alzheimer's patients. Our guidelines cover the following aspects: (i) choosing right in-game challenges, (ii) designing appropriate interaction mechanisms for cognitively impaired people, (iii) implementing artificial intelligence for providing adequate assistive prompting and dynamic difficulty adjustments, (iv) producing effective visual and auditory assets to maximize cognitive training. Also, as a case study, we present the prototype of our new serious game for Alzheimer's patients.