Empathy map game

• Main Author: Shek, Yu Hong
• Other Authors: Miao Chun Yan
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Software::Software engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/62884
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The global share of elder people is growing rapidly and there has been an increasing number of these elderly starting to live alone. Being disconnected with family, these elderlies may experience loneliness and low morale. Beyond social-emotional problems, elderlies also face health issues that come along with aging. Of which, dementia is one of the foremost causes of disability and dependency among older people worldwide. Research has shown that word-finding exercise shows promise in detecting symptoms of dementia with cognitive intervention emerging as therapeutic approach for dementia. Other studies shows that digital games help to maintain cognitive function, improve happiness and is a suitable activity for elderlies to engage in. This project designs and proposes a novel word association mobile game as a form of cognitive exercise to stimulate cognitive activity and provide entertainment for the seniors. Interaction with other players in the gameplay is also designed to help combat loneliness. The game consist of two sets of word-association exercises, which take the form of creating and guessing of a riddle. The "Create" game allows players to freely associate words with regards to a given topic word. The formulated associations will then facilitate as hints for other players to guess the respective riddle. The "Guess" game, on the other hand, requires players to use these hints created by other players to guess the topic word, from a list of options. The creating and guessing process is structured and reinforced by the elements of the Empathy Map visualization tool, which ensures word-association is performed in 4 dimensions – see, feel, say and do. Another mechanism designed in the game is the voting system, which allows players to vote a thumbs up or down for any question they have attempted. Harnessing the community’s opinion, good questions will appear more often while bad ones are filtered away. Besides filtering questions according to popularity, the data collected in the game are also analysed to track and evaluate user performance. As such, these data has great potential, especially in the analysis of the game community as well as on studies of word association sets generated by players. Further works on the game may include the adding of more game elements such as different level of difficulties and game modes, completing on user studies and more in-depth analysis of user information to potentially apply these word-association exercise to greater contribute to dementia patients.