Advances in playful motivation for daily multimodal training and diagnostics: the AktivDaheim game for people with dementia

Meaningful treatment of dementia today consists of multi-component interventions, such as, cognitive and also physical, sensomotor oriented stimulation. A serious game was developed for multimodal training performed by clients and caregiver using easily configurable services on a Tablet PC. A key problem in developing substantial knowledge about dementia and impacting factors is lack of data about mental processes evolving over time. For this purpose, eye tracking data were captured from non-obtrusive sensing during the game to enable continuous monitoring of dementia profiles. An antisaccade paradigm was used to detect attention inhibition problems that typically occur in executive function related neurodegenerative diseases, such as, in Alzheimer. In a 6 month study with 12 users a classifier was developed that enables to discriminate dementia stages from robustly extracted eye movement features received from training at home. The playful training and its diagnostics oriented toolbox offer affordances for entertaining users, measuring and analysis of mental process parameters, to enable people with dementia to stay longer at home and slowing down the progress of disease.