Serious games
Within the Action Group A3 of the EIP on AHA - Prevention and early diagnosis of functional and cognitive decline, CBIM is partner for a project concerning design, implementation and validation of a software platform for pre-symptomatic and early symptomatic assessment of cognitive impairments.
The project partnership involves National Neurological Institute Foundation C.Mondino of Pavia, the Department of Brain and Behavioral Science of the University of Pavia and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) in Barcelona, Spain.
The scientific cooperation with Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) started in May 2011, with the signature of a cooperation agreement in Barcelona.
The Smart Aging Serious Game software platform asks people to perform tasks related to daily activities, closer to real life than traditional paper&pencil tests, and, in doing so, it is able to evaluate different cognitive functions: executive functions (reasoning and planning), attention (selected and divided), memory (short and long term, perspective), orientation (visuospatial).
Within the Call 6 - Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Joint Programme, “ ICT-based Solutions for Supporting Occupation in Life of Older Adults” the SeniorLudens Project was founded, with the partnership of CBIM and other Spanish, Swiss and Dutch Insitutions.
Older workers often face two major problems compared to their younger colleagues, due to either internal reasons or external societal factors. The first problem many older workers have is a difficulty in adapting to new workplaces and new procedures, often discouraging them from engaging in new professional and voluntary activities. The second problem, which is some extent a result of the first problem, is that the enormous experience they have accumulated over decades of work is often undocumented and difficult to pass on to future generations, so the knowledge of senior people (often related to specific procedures developed by themselves in earlier years of their careers) is commonly lost once they leave the organization. There is thus a need for technological solutions which help organizations to simultaneously facilitate the integration of older employees and to capture and retain the knowledge of their senior employees before they retire.
Serious Games in 3D virtual environments that reproduce aspects of the workplace can help older people to familiarize with a new environment, virtually train work procedures and detect difficulties before getting engaged in new tasks. This allows them to receive objective feedback on their capacities in a secure environment and feel more motivated and optimistic when they begin to perform the real tasks.
The motivation and independence provided by SeniorLudens to perform new types of tasks will also facilitate the incorporation of older people to volunteering activities.
Therefore, the main goal in SeniorLudens project is to integrate innovative technologies in order to provide enterprises with a Serious Game development platform for fast and cheap creation of serious professional training games in an easy way in order to be suitable for its use by the older workforce.
This main project issues will be assessed in three different application areas:
- IT companies, Responsible INDRA Software Labs Spain
- Healthcare, Responsible Fondazione Don Gnocchi Italia, YouRehab AG Switzerland and Patients Associations (Unie KBO, Netherlands)
- Food processing, Responsible CBIM Italy