A Taxonomy of Serious Games for Dementia

Abstract

Serious games for dementia (SG4D) hold their own, unique and significant space within the Games for Health domain. However, the SG4D field still has not been fully mapped out and classified. In this work, we present a generic taxonomy of serious games for dementia, based on the health functions and the health purposes they serve. Firstly, we classify dementia games based on the health function they serve, in: cognitive, physical and social-emotional games. Each of these functions serves a variety of health purposes, leading us to a second, lower level of classification in: preventative, rehabilitative, assessing and educative games. Furthermore, we provide an ex-post evaluation of the proposed taxonomy by exploring whether the existing serious games for dementia can be validly classified, based on the proposed taxonomic characters. To this end, we collect and analyse a set of dementia-related serious games (e.g. WiiSports, Big Brain Academy, Cognifit, MinWii, et al.) by performing a literature review. The results show that the taxonomical system covers a sub-field of "games for health" and indicates areas which are under-explored by current games. KeywordsAlzheimer's disease; dementia; mild cognitive impairment; serious games; taxonomy; IntroductionVideo games can be developed for the purpose of changing player's attitudes and behaviours, being both an expressive and a persuasive medium [3,14]. With a persuasive strategy in consideration, for purposes other than pure entertainment, the long existing field of "serious games" has found broad application in the video games industry, attempting to educate, train, and inspire the players [28,32,36].One of the key areas of application of serious games is the health domain, targeting changes in health-related behaviours. Games for Health (G4H) provide opportu-

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