Section: New Results

Serious Game for older adults with dementia

Participants : Minh Khue Phan Tran, François Brémond.

keywords: human-machine interaction, serious games, Alzheimer, activity recognition

Serious Games is carried out within the framework of the Az@GAME project . This project is to create games offering patient-oriented scenarios so as to measure their health progress, improve their physical fitness, stimulate their cognitive abilities, and help maintain their social skills. The main objective is to design a system interacting with older adults suffering from Alzheimer's or Alzheimer's related diseases. The three challenges in designing the system are:

• perception's precision : how does the system choose the "best moments" to interact with a patient ?

• attractive-visualization : how does the system make the patients comfortable?

• ease of interaction : how can it optimize the interaction with the patients ? In what way ?

The first prototype is under development. The system consists of two parts: Recognition and Interaction . Each component requires a 3D camera (Microsoft Kinect for the recognition component and Asus Xtion Pro Live Camera for the interaction component). The recognition part consists in observing the scene and deciding the best time to interact with a patient via the Asus camera. It uses the SUP framework. Afterwards, the interactive system tries to engage the patient via an interface and through Microsoft Kinect, the patient can interact with the interface using voice or gesture. The interface is designed with the Unity 3D game engine.

The first experiment will be conducted in the coffee area. The aim is to test the functionality of the system and measure its accuracy and effectiveness. The system will observe the scene and invite people who are getting coffee or taking a break to play the game. Depending on the interaction with the person, the system will offer different scenarios. Videos will be recorded, with the consent of the subject, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of system. The recorded videos and meta-data provided by SUP will be evaluated to determine the accuracy of the system.