Developing and evaluating serious games and input techniques for people with moderate to severe dementia using heuristic evaluation

Abstract

A large percentage of people with dementia in nursing homes suffer from apathy. In order to combat this and improve the quality of life, play has been found to have a positive impact. To encourage play, certain interactive virtual games have been made that promote physical activity, cognitive stimulation, sensory stimulation and social interaction. This has been found to reduce apathy in people with dementia. Designing games for this target group is difficult because they could be unable to share their own feelings on the experience and planning test sessions with them is more difficult than usual. The purpose of this study is to provide a heuristic evaluation method to analyse these games with professional care-providers instead of the target audience. This evaluation method is performed on a case game implementation. This serious game is designed specifically for mobility-restricted people with dementia to reduce apathy, using a list of recommendations that’s created based on a literature study and an expert survey. The results of the evaluation show that the case game does incentivize physical activity, cognitive stimulation, sensory stimulation and social interaction, which suggests it can be used to reduce apathy. The heuristic evaluation method successfully produces a list of concrete next steps for the case game. The evaluation method can be applied to evaluate these specific kinds of games without needing the target audience.