Section: New Results

Maintaining the engagement of older adults with dementia while interacting with serious game

Participants : Minh Khue Phan Tran, Philippe Robert, François Brémond.

keywords: Older adults, Dementia, Engagement, Serious game,

The contribution of Phan-Tran's thesis [23] is to provide an approach that can help older adults with dementia while playing serious games. The approach proposes a set of interaction strategies to solve a difficult situation by suitable interactions. A strategy is a rule which defines a set of interactions to transfer from a situation to another one. A situation is defined and recognized by the perception on the users characteristics (position, posture, gesture, game performance). Once an interaction strategy is chosen, the approach helps the user throughout a 3D animated avatar 34. 11 strategies are defined as well as 21 situations and 13 interactions.

Three experiments have been performed with the older participants with dementia. The results shown positive impacts on the participants engagement:

• the participants can finish the game session;

• their performance while playing with the avatar's helps is similar that the one while playing with a therapist.

The proposed approach can be improved because the types of situations defined and recognized during 3 experiments are not quite so much and the difficulty level of games used in the experiment is still low. The ongoing work aims to apply the proposed approach to a more difficult game and to explore new situations.