Serious game for cognitive stimulation of older people with Mild Cognitive Impairment: Design and pilot study (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND Cognitive stimulation of older people helps to prevent, and even treat, age-related diseases, such as Mild Cognitive Impairment. Playing games reduces the probability of suffering from this pathology related to the loss of the ability to carry out some instrumental activities of daily living. OBJECTIVE This work describes the design and development of a serious game for the cognitive stimulation of the elderly with exercises related to the daily life task of shopping, presenting also a pilot study for its preliminary usability validation. METHODS The designed serious game includes four exercises consisting of shopping in a hypermarket, ordering products, payments and organizing the purchase, dealing thus with the most frequent cognitive problems of elderly associated to episodic declarative memory, naming, calculation and organization, respectively. RESULTS 19 older people participated in the pilot study for the usability validation of the serious game, indicating that they like the aesthetic and interesting topic of the game. It has a high level of entertainment and could be useful in daily life for mental stimulation. It is intuitive, but the ease of use and readability of the instructions could be improved. CONCLUSIONS This study suggests that the innovative serious game developed could be accepted by older people for their cognitive stimulation in order to prevent or treat Mild Cognitive Impairment, although a long-term intervention test should be performed. Its ecological validity design with everyday tasks, adaptable level of difficulty and motivational mechanisms include a differentiating factor compared to similar serious games.