Section: New Results

Serious Exergames for Cognitive Stimulation

Participants : Guillaume Sacco, Monique Thonnat.

Keywords: Neurocognitive disorders, Serious games, Geriatrics, Executive functions, Physical exercise, Cognitive training

A PhD thesis has been defended on the 8th of June at Nice University on this topic by Guillaume Sacco. This thesis presents a clinical and therapeutic approach aiming to create new care for patients with neurocognitive disorder. Serious exergames are serious video games integrating physical activity. Serious exergames could be tools to product enriched environment associating physical exercise and cognitive training. The aim of this thesis is to investigate whether serious exergames can contribute to the non-pharmacological management of neurocognitive disorders. In this thesis we have made two types of contributions. The first type are general contributions. One presents our integrative clinical approach associating physical exercise and cognitive training using serious exergames. The other one presents recommendations concerning the use of serious exergames. The second type of contributions are experimental. The first one aims to confirm a theoretical base of our clinical approach. The two other experiments assess the implementation of our approached in a population of patients with neurocognitive disorder. This year the integrative clinical approach associating physical exercise and cognitive training using serious exergames has been published [32] and presented at the International Conference on Gerontechnology ISG in Saint Petersburg, Florida, USA in May 2018.