Towards an evaluation method of how accessible serious games are to older adults

Abstract

The loss of cognitive and motor functions in humans increases with age, and the aging population is expected to continue growing significantly in the following years. In this context, serious games have become a tool that supports health professionals in mitigating age-related cognitive problems. Additionally, the accessibility provided by those tools is a determinant factor when users need to adapt themselves to a particular technology. Therefore, this paper presents an accessibility model and an evaluation method useful for assessing how accessible serious games are to older adults, based on the Games Accessibility Guidelines (GAG) proposed by the International Game Developers Association and the ISO/IEC 25040. In order to validate and ensure the feasibility of this study, each activity of the proposed method has been applied to a real game that was created for improving certain cognitive functions (i.e., A Clockwork Brain suite of serious games).