Serious Games and the Cognitive Screening of Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Systematic Review

This paper presents a systematic review of the literature aiming to analyze the state of the art of the use of serious games to detect age related cognitive impairments of community-dwelling older adults by identifying (i) the interaction paradigms being used, (ii) the cognitive domains being assessed, and (iii) how the proposed applications were evaluated. A systematic electronic search was performed, and 25 studies were included in the systematic review. The most used interaction paradigm was simulation of daily tasks, while memory, executive functions, and attention were the cognitive domains most referred. Six articles reported on diagnostic accuracy studies and their results indicate that serious games can discriminate between normal cognition and nonnormal cognition, since they present high sensitivity and specificity values.