Psicoestimula

The project Psicoestimula consists in the design, development and evaluation of Serious Games application for the cognitive rehabilitation and entertainment of elderly people. The fact that the games can be played at the users’ convenience and from the comfort of their homes makes them easy to use, increasing willingness to perform the tasks and reducing expenditure and time for medical centers.The main objective of the system is to help this group improve some of their skills, such as spatial vision, memory or attention.With that purpose, the system architecture is based on a three layer design: a user interface layer, database layer and logics layer.System architectureThe application has been developed for the iPad. Those tablets are more manageable and mobile than other videogames or devices, making them perfect for users with physical limitations.For its usage, the user then selects a rehabilitation game/activity (puzzles or bingo). After reading some brief game instructions, the user goes to the main game menu. There he/she can perform different actions.These are the two main games:

Puzzles Activities

Puzzle activities have been chosen to work with the elderly trying to improve their memory and spatial vision.Firstly, the entire image is displayed for 10 seconds so that the user can try to memorise it and notice the details. The image is then divided into pieces and the user has to drag them into the correct positions on the main board. When checking, the system notifies the user if there is an error and he/she must move the pieces and try again. When the game has been correctly completed, a short explanation of the image content is displayed, and the user is given the option to continue playing (the level of difficulty increases as puzzles are completed) or exit.

Bingo Activities

This game is similar to conventional bingo but has words instead of numbers. This exercise focuses on improving the players attention skills since he/she has to watch the words that are scrolled across the top part of the screen and mark them on his/her card. Each word on the card appears once, together with other words that are not on the card. Like the previous game, different levels of difficulty can be selected.The system was tested on a group of 20 seniors and the values obtained indicated some differences between the proposed related to the time used to complete the task and the level of difficulty.

Figure 1: Playing puzzle game


Figure 2: Playing Bingo game

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