A semantic jile s~stem is an information storage system

No abstract

Abstract. MINWii, a new serious video game targeting Alzheimer and demented patients, is a simple Music Therapy tool usable by untrained care givers. Its objective is to improve patients' self-image (renarcissization) to reduce behavioral symptoms, which are an important cause of institutionalization. With MINWii, elderly gamers use Wiimotes to improvise or play predefined songs on a virtual keyboard. We detail our design process, which addresses the specific features of dementia: this iterative refinement scheme, built upon qualitative, small scale experiments in a therapeutic environment, led to a shift of MINWii's original focus from creativity to reminiscence. A large majority of our patients, with mild to moderate dementia, expressed a strong interest in our system, which was confirmed by feedback from the care givers. A fully controlled usability study of MINWii is currently under way, which should lead to future research assessing its actual therapeutic impact.

We present a new static system which reconstructs the types, regions and effects of expressions in an implicitly typed functional language that supports imperative operations on reference values. Just as types structurally abstract collections of concrete values, regions represent sets of possibly aliased reference values and effects represent approximations of the imperative behaviour on regions.We introduce a static semantics for inferring types, regions and effects, and prove that it is consistent with respect to the dynamic semantics of the language. We present a reconstruction algorithm that computes the types and effects of expressions, and assigns regions to reference values. We prove the correctness of the reconstruction algorithm with respect to the static semantics. Finally, we discuss potential applications of our system to automatic stack allocation and parallel code generation.

MINWii is a music therapy game for the renarcissization of demented patients. It lets players improvise or play songs of their choice by pointing at a virtual keyboard with a Wiimote Pistol. We present the results of a three-month usability study we conducted with 7 institutionalized patients suffering from mild to moderately severe Alzheimer's disease at the LUSAGE Living Lab in Paris. We demonstrate that MINWii is indeed usable by AD patients despite their motor and cognitive impairments: our results, which were largely computed automatically thanks to MINWii's extensive logging capabilities, show either an instant mastery or a clear learning effect depending on patients' cognitive abilities. Moreover, patients were overall very satisfied with the game and expressed a desire to repeat the experience: MINWii fosters positive interaction with the caregivers and elicits powerful reminiscence with even the most severely impaired patients. This study justifies future research to assess the lasting effects of playing MINWii on both quality of life and cognitive impairment in demented patients.