Micogito: a serious gamebook based on daily life scenarios to cognitively stimulate older adults

With the increase in the number of people aged 60 years and older, it becomes essential to promote active ageing. Adequate cognitive training activity can preserve older adults' health conditions, allowing them to live autonomously longer. However, older people often have difficulties with the use of digital technologies and risk being excluded from these. For this reason, this work proposes a solution that introduces older adults to new technologies while maintaining a familiar appearance to them. The solution proposed is Micogito, a web serious game that exploits the book metaphor for cognitive stimulation of older adults. It supports tasks which replicate daily living activities, and has been conceived, and designed to stimulate the most implicated cognitive functions in ageing and particularly in mild cognitive impairment. In its design and implementation, guidelines useful to make web applications accessible and usable for the target users were considered. We also report on a first user test with older adults, to assess the effectiveness of this approach, which provided useful and encouraging feedback, and discuss some lessons learnt.