Increasing Engagement in Elderly People through Tangible and Distributed User Interfaces

Abstract

Ageing population will be an increasing challenge. Latent growth curve analyses of accelerating decline in cognitive abilities in late adulthood. The games-based therapy is an alternative that helps them improve and maintain their cognitive abilities. However, playing for a day is not enough, as improvements are achieved with regular playing. Thus, it is necessary to design games that motivate and provide incentives to keep playing. In this paper we describe an application based on tangible and distributed user interfaces, which has been designed according to guidelines that allow users to feel motivated and engaged using the system.

Tangible User Interface for Social Interactions for the Elderly: A Review of Literature

“…The study design of these 21 papers did not give enough detail in terms of the elderly user involvement. Spreicer et al [44], Tellioglu et al [46], Marques et al [53], and De la Guía et al [54] did not provide much information about their participants throughout the paper. This made it difficult for us to understand more about their study design.…”

“…Process. Out of 21 papers in our review, Spreicer et al [44] Tellioglu et al [46], Marques et al [53], and De la Guía et al [54] did not provide clear information about their elderly participants, while West et al [45] and Zhao et al [49] only involved elderly participants during their design process and not in the testing or evaluation process. Having elderly participants before or during design can ensure more precise user requirements from the actual users: elderly people.…”

“…All 21 papers presented their prototypes and all but two [51,52] involved users in their evaluations. Four papers [44,46,53,54] reported that they had evaluation but did not present information about their sample. Thus combining the two papers that did not involve users in their evaluation, a total of six papers had no sample.…”

Cross-Device Taxonomy

“…In the health domain there have been a few studies in the wild, including work on exploring presurgery scenarios [3], supporting patient registration [363], and designing distributed user interface systems in surgery practice [87,217]. Other health applications are designed for personal use, namely memory games [72], cognitive training [73], and physical activity monitoring [172].…”

Tangibot: A tangible-mediated robot to support cognitive games for ageing people—A usability study

“…present CogniPlay [24], a gaming platform running on tablets which includes several games to stimulate cognitive abilities, such as matching pairs to enhance short-term memory and social interaction through competition. De La Guía et al [30,31] also explore cognitive games for the elderly using smartphones and tangibles to increase the engagement of ageing users. However, the consideration of small displays may entail, on the one hand, visualization problems for the elderly.…”