Inclusive Education: Mobile Serious Games for People with Cognitive Disabilities

Nowadays, the use of mobile devices is increasingly frequent. In many occasions they are used as a means of entertainment for people through video games. Serious games is a category of video games used as teaching methods in different environments. They use fun as a strategy for the learning process. However, the vast majority do not focus on vulnerable groups such as people with cognitive disabilities, because they do not consider accessibility parameters in their design. Some video games development companies have proposed general guidelines for the implementation of accessible video games, but they have not been formalized as good practices or standards. This article presents a compilation and analysis of different accessibility guidelines for the development of mobile serious games for people with cognitive disabilities. It also proposes a model to evaluate the access of serious games for people with cognitive disabilities and applies it in a case study. Finally, an evaluation tool is proposed for mobile serious games developers focused on people with cognitive disabilities

Inclusive Education: Mobile Serious Games for People with Cognitive Disabilities

Nowadays, the use of mobile devices is increasingly frequent. In many occasions they are used as a means of entertainment for people through video games. Serious games is a category of video games used as teaching methods in different environments. They use fun as a strategy for the learning process. However, the vast majority do not focus on vulnerable groups such as people with cognitive disabilities, because they do not consider accessibility parameters in their design. Some video games development companies have proposed general guidelines for the implementation of accessible video games, but they have not been formalized as good practices or standards. This article presents a compilation and analysis of different accessibility guidelines for the development of mobile serious games for people with cognitive disabilities. It also proposes a model to evaluate the access of serious games for people with cognitive disabilities and applies it in a case study. Finally, an evaluation tool is proposed for mobile serious games developers focused on people with cognitive disabilities

Therapeutic serious game design guidelines for stimulating cognitive abilities of children with speech and language delay

The creation of an effective therapeutic serious game (TSG) is highly dependent upon its design and the fundamental knowledge of the users. Furthermore, the TSG is designed for a purpose to the users by incorporating the needs of the users in all design components.Although numerous studies have been conducted on guidelines for designing serious games, to date, studies on the specific TSG’s design guidelines for stimulating the cognitive ability of children with speech and language delay (CSLD) has yet to be comprehensively studied.Therefore, this study focuses on the set of design guidelines for the development of TSG for CSLD, specifically on cognitive stimulation.The TSG design guidelines in this paper are derived through the study of relevant literature, and best practices gained from interviews with experts in the area of speech pathology.These guidelines would be useful for researchers and game designers to design TSG for CSLD focusing on cognitive stimulation

Technology-enhanced support for children with Down Syndrome: A systematic literature review

This paper presents a systematic literature review on technology-enhanced support for children with Down Syndrome and young people who match the mental age of children considered neurotypical (NT). The main aim is threefold: to (1) explore the field of digital technologies designed to support children with Down Syndrome, (2) identify technology types, contexts of use, profiles of individuals with Down Syndrome, methodological approaches, and the effectiveness of such supports, and (3) draw out opportunities for future research in this specific area. A systematic literature review was conducted on five search engines resulting in a set of 703 articles, which were screened and filtered in a systematic way until they were narrowed to a corpus of 65 articles for further analysis. The synthesis identify several key findings: (1) there is diversity of technology supports available for children with Down Syndrome targeting individual capabilities, (2) overlapping definitions of technology makes it difficult to place technology supports in individual categories rather than subsets of a broader term, (3) the average sample size remained small for participants in the studies, making it difficult to draw solid conclusions on the effectiveness of the related interventions, (4) the distribution of papers indicates that this is an emerging area of research and is starting to build body of knowledge, and (5) there are limited studies on newer emerging technologies which requires further investigation to explore their potential