A method to build serious games for older adults ADE2: evaluation of user perceptions and threats of validity

Abstract

ver the years, people decrease their ability to remember certain events, which is more evident in older adults. Therefore, cognitive health professionals use tools and methods to train and assess attention and memory; among those solutions are found serious games. These games are intended to teach, while the player has fun. These games’ demand an important amount of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) characteristics, which are not formally included during their development. A previous contribution, presented a first approach of a method to build serious games, named ADE2. In those studies, we established as further work the need of perform the empirical evaluation of the solution. Therefore, this paper presents an experimental process, where the ADE2 method has been evaluated by 22 software engineers, who evaluated it by using the Method Evaluation Model (MEM). The results show that the ADE2 method can be successfully adopted by the software engineering community, and the actions performed, by following each step of the method, can be reached effectively and efficiently.