Towards adopting serious games for cognitive tests with Brazilian older people

Abstract

Serious games are a promising tool in different scenarios, such as education and health; however, there has been little research reported on their specialized use for older adults. We created a digital cognitive test – with the characteristics of a serious game – using Unified Design aiming to reproduce digitally the results of clinical cognitive evaluation in older people. The digital cognitive test was submitted to two validation experiments targeting an older public (n=40) with little experience in dealing with tablets or smartphones. The first experiment did not show significant correlation, but from it, we implemented initiatives to simplify the tests, which brought a positive result regarding convergence analysis in the second experiment. We concluded that it is possible to use digital games as cognitive tests adapted to the needs of older adults to achieve similar results as those of paper-based cognitive tests.