Heuristics and Recommendations for the Design of Mobile Serious Games for Older Adults

Mônica Da Consolação Machado,Ronan Loschi Rodrigues Ferreira,Lucila Ishitani

doi:10.1155/2018/6757151

Abstract

As people get older, their physical and cognitive functions decline. Meeting these needs is an important goal to be reached, to propose activities that may contribute to a better quality of life, including leisure and learning. As such, this paper aims to present a set of heuristics and recommendations for the design of mobile serious games for older adults. To elaborate these heuristics and recommendations, we conducted two studies with older people. In the first study, we invited people aged 60 or more to evaluate mobile games, intending to collect data that could help us to adapt the heuristics that were already published to the public of this research. In the period between the two studies, we developed a serious mobile game (Labuta Batuta) that met the set of adapted heuristics. In the second study, we invited another group of older people, aged 45 or over, to qualitatively evaluate Labuta Batuta, in order to develop a Grounded Theory about the desirable characteristics for the design of serious mobile games for older adults. Besides a Grounded Theory, the second study allowed the identification of nine requirements to be considered when designing the mechanics of mobile games for older adults.

Highlights

In the last decades, the demand for the so-called “adult games” has grown, due to the ageing of the population [1].During the ageing process, human being undergoes physical, psychic, and cognitive restrictions, facing new needs and expectations [1,2,3]
This shows that the participants understood the purpose of each game and the way they should interact with the games
The category improvement of knowledge gather the following codes or subcategories: learning to use the touch screen, putting into practice what he/she learned through the game, considering that what he/she did in the game was interesting for his/her learning, relating game elements to day-to-day practices, relating technological terms to those presented in the game, and learning through the game

Summary

Introduction

Human being undergoes physical, psychic, and cognitive restrictions, facing new needs and expectations [1,2,3]. The use of digital games helps to reduce disability and depression and to improve reaction times, balance, and mobility of older adults [4, 5]. As [6,7,8], emphasise that digital games can help older adults in terms of entertainment, relaxation, socialization, mental challenges, and physical fitness, improving the quality of the ageing process. The human ageing process causes physical, psychological, and cognitive decline. Loss of memory, attention, association, perception, and reasoning must be considered in the development of digital games for older adults [11]

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Discussion

Conclusion