Development of an Augmented Reality-Based Serious Game: A Cognitive Assessment Study

Cognitive impairment in the elderly can be associated with the normal aging processes or be a symptom of dementia. Early detection of dementia has many advantages since the lack of diagnosis prevents proper social and medical care. Cognitive screening is the preliminary step in cognitive impairment assessment, leading to early detection. However, the traditional tools have intrinsic limitations such as culture, gender, educational biases, long test-rest periods, and learning effects. The rapid growth of technology has considerably improved cognitive intervention through serious games. Serious games have the potential to overcome those challenges and replace traditional, paper-based, and computerized cognitive screening tools. This study introduces a serious game design based on augmented reality to assess cognitive impairments. Thirty-one healthy participants took part in this study. The cognitive ability of the participants was initially assessed using the Montreal Cognitive test (MoCA). The performance of the proposed serious game was then evaluated and compared with the MoCA scores. A high correlation was observed between the total game score and the total MoCA Score. However, not all the game sub-scores showed high correlation with relevant parts of the MoCA test.