Kiki Spanjers

PhD-student serious games and gamification in senior care.

PRESENTATION

Roodkapje (Little red riding hood): the development of a gamified application as conversation facilitator for people with dementia and their informal carers
Together with the diagnosis dementia, many things in daily life change or will change quickly. These changes might lead to issues you would like to discuss together to anticipate, but are sometimes difficult to discuss (e.g. cooking, personal hygiene, inheritance, and preferences for future care). In order to support people in having these conversations, the Dutch application Roodkapje (Little red riding hood) was developed. Roodkapje is a so called gamified application that is designed as a conversation facilitator for people with dementia and their informal carers. Grandmother comes across different topics, depicted in such a manner that players are encouraged to reflect and start the conversation on their own situation. Roodkapje was developed in collaboration with older persons and their relatives, both with and without dementia. The development process of applications as this is often complex, that is why we would like to share our learned lessons regarding content production, usability testing and app development. We used literature, surveys, and a focus group to collect the most important and difficult to discuss issues. During the development process older adults played prototypes of the game in order to provide us with feedback on user friendliness and use of the game as conversation facilitator. This feedback gave us insight on how to develop an application for older adults with dementia; we started the app as a serious game, but this did not fit the target audience. The current application is an interactive tool to facilitate conversations on changes due to dementia.