This paper addresses a different point of view of videogames, specifically serious games for health. This paper contributes to that area with a multidisciplinary perspective focus on neurosciences and computation. The experiment population has been pre-adolescents between the ages of 8 and 12 without any cognitive issues. The experiment consisted in users playing videogames as well as performing traditional psychological assessments; during these tasks the frontal brain activity was evaluated. The main goal was to analyse how the frontal lobe of the brain (executive function) works in terms of prominent cognitive skills during five types of game mechanics widely used in commercial videogames. The analysis was made by collecting brain signals during the two phases of the experiment, where the signals were analysed with an electroencephalogram neuroheadset. The validated hypotheses were whether videogames can develop executive functioning and if it was possible to identify which kind of cognitive skills are developed during each kind of typical videogame mechanic. The results contribute to the design of serious games for health purposes on a conceptual level, particularly in support of the diagnosis and treatment of cognitive-related pathologies.

Assistive technologies can improve the quality of life of people diagnosed with different forms of social communication disorders. We report on the design and evaluation of an affective avatar aimed at engaging the user in a social interaction with the purpose of assisting in communication therapies. A human-avatar taxonomy is proposed to assist the design of affective avatars aimed at addressing social communication disorder. The avatar was evaluated with 30 subjects to assess how effectively it conveys the desired emotion and elicits empathy from the user. Results provide evidence that users become used to the avatar after a number of interactions, and they perceive the defined behavior as being logical. The users' interactions with the avatar entail affective reactions, including the mimic emotions that users felt, and establish a preliminary ground truth about prototypic empathic interactions with avatars that is being used to train learning algorithms to support social communication disorder evaluation.

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In recent times, diagnosing and treating different health issues have improved greatly with the help of technology, with an example being cognitive health issues. Despite this, there is still a difference between how the technology is working towards it and the actual potential that can be achieved. In this paper, we propose a mobile application with an affective avatar, encompassed in the area of serious games, which will obtain information related to the interactions performed by the users. There are a total of 50 users, of neurotypical and nonneurotypical backgrounds, with the latter being people with Down syndrome and intellectual disability. Based on collected data from the different users interacting with the avatar in a mobile device, we analyzed the results to obtain a ground truth about prototypic empathic interactions and feed those interactions to a learning algorithm to support the diagnosis process and therapy treatment of empathy and socialization issues.