Smart Ageing Serious Games software platform for assessment of cognitive impairments
Smart Ageing Serious Games (SASGs) has been planned as a 3D virtual reality based Serious Game for early assessment of cognitive impairments. The navigation in a 3D environment that stimulates in a reduced space the basic elements of interaction of home living, associated with the game approach result in a powerful screening tool.
The tool - designed and developed by the research institution CBIM (Italy) and evaluated by the Don Carlo Gnocchi Foundation (Italy) - allows to ask people to perform tasks related to daily activities and, in doing so, it is able to evaluate different cognitive functions: executive (reasoning and planning), attention (selected and divided), memory (short and long term, perspective), orientation (visuo-spatial).
In the first step, the platform was tested in terms of usability in a group of 1086 healthy subjects with and age range of 50-80 years. Findings demonstrated the validity of SASGs for assessing cognitive functions in normal ageing.
“In the evaluation step 2, 108 subjects with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and 106 Healthy Controls (HC) performed with a single SASGs session and a single brain MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) acquisition in order to measure hippocampal volumes, as a marker of downstream neuronal degeneration – Stefania Pazzi of CBIM says.”
Results show reduced performances for aMCI, if compared with HC, in the majority of SASGs tasks.
“Recently – continues Stefania Pazzi – 80 MCI and VCI (vascular cognitive impairment) subjects performed SASGs session within the “Games for Older Active Life” project funded by Tuscany Region (Italy). 30 subjects have also been involved in home rehabilitation activities, both physical and cognitive. Findings evaluation are still in progress.
The SASGs project is part of the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP on AHA).
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Relevant publication: Bottiroli S et al. G: Smart Aging Platform for Evaluating Cognitive Functioning in Aging: A Comparison with the MoCA in a Normal Population, Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, November 2017 doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2017.00379.