Increasing engagement in elderly people through tangible and distributed user interfaces

Abstract

Ageing population will be an increasing challenge. Latent growth curve analyses of accelerating decline in cognitive abilities in late adulthood. The games-based therapy is an alternative that helps them improve and maintain their cognitive abilities. However, playing for a day is not enough, as improvements are achieved with regular playing. Thus, it is necessary to design games that motivate and provide incentives to keep playing. In this paper we describe an application based on tangible and distributed user interfaces, which has been designed according to guidelines that allow users to feel motivated and engaged using the system.