Older adults’ motivations in game based systems: Heuristic definition and its connection with fun

Efforts are currently being made to generate wellbeing in the elderly population in order to achieve a good quality of life through the improvement of health, social interaction and psychological health. This is achieved, in addition to other options, through the application of game-based systems, presenting positive results that have been evidenced in several studies. These types of approaches are not only applied for entertainment and leisure, but also for learning and generating positive feelings, as a means of escape from loneliness, isolation, health improvement and support in daily life. Although these experiences are gradually being applied to the older adult population, they have usually been oriented to a young population with different characteristics, needs and motivations, where technological mastery is taken for granted. This makes an older adult feel limited when initially interacting with this type of experiences, which prevents them from fully using and enjoying these technological solutions. In this article, different motivational aspects that encourage older adults to use gamebased systems (for learning, fun, health, etc.) were identified and characterized in order to increase the use of this type of technologies, and to improve the design and evaluation of these experiences to obtain greater enjoyment from the end users. These aspects were represented by a motivational model and then established as a set of heuristics. These heuristics were evaluated by means of an expert judgment focused on the design of game experiences, obtaining positive results for the use of these elements as guides in the design and construction of Game-Based Systems oriented to older adults. This set of heuristics and their application were published in the PL/PX web platform for detailed explanation, access and use by the academic communityMINCIENCIAS of government of ColombiaFCT – Fundaçao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia, I.P. [Project UIDB/05105/202

Analyzing Performance Effects of Neural Networks Applied to Lane Recognition under Various Environmental Driving Conditions

Acknowledgments: Authors would like to thank the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and the Institut de recherche sur l’hydrogène for their collaboration and assistance.Lane detection is an essential module for the safe navigation of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Estimating the vehicle’s position and trajectory on the road is critical; however, several environmental variables can affect this task. State-of-the-art lane detection methods utilize convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as feature extractors to obtain relevant features through training using multiple kernel layers. It makes them vulnerable to any statistical change in the input data or noise affecting the spatial characteristics. In this paper, we compare six different CNN architectures to analyze the effect of various adverse conditions, including harsh weather, illumination variations, and shadows/occlusions, on lane detection. Among all the aforementioned adverse conditions, harsh weather in general and snowy night conditions particularly affect the performance by a large margin. The average detection accuracy of the networks decreased by 75.2%, and the root mean square error (RMSE) increased by 301.1%. Overall, the results show a noticeable drop in the networks’ accuracy for all adverse conditions because the features’ stochastic distributions change for each state.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaCanada Research Chair

Automatic captions on video calls: a must for the older adults

Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. Work co-financed by the Canary Islands Agency for Research, Innovation and Information Society of the Ministry of Economy, Knowledge and Employment and by the European Social Fund (ESF) Integrated Operational Program of the Canary Islands 2014–2020, Axis 3 Priority Topic 74 (85%). This work has been supported by the PERGAMEX ACTIVE project, Ref. RTI2018- 096986-B-C32, funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation. Spain. Agencia Canaria de Investigación, Innovación y Sociedad de la Información (TESIS2020010113).In recent years, the use of video call or video conference tools has not stopped increasing, and especially due to the COVID- 19 pandemic, the use of video calls increased in the educational and work spheres, but also in the family sphere, due to the risks of contagion in face-to-face meetings. Throughout the world, many older people are affected by hearing loss. Auditory functional diversity can make it difficult to enjoy video calls. Using automatic captions might help these people, but not all video calling tools offer this functionality, and some offer it in some languages. We developed an automatic conversation captioning tool using Automatic Speech Recognition and Speech to Text, using the free software tool Coqui STT. This automatic captioning tool is independent of the video call platform used and allows older adults or anyone with auditory functional diversity to enjoy video calls in a simple way. A transparent user interface was designed for our tool that overlays the video call window, and the tool allows us to easily change the text size, color, and background settings. It is also important to remember that many older people have visual functional diversity, so they could have problems reading the texts, thus it is important that each person can adapt the text to their needs. An analysis has been carried out that includes older people to analyze the benefits of the interface, as well as some configuration preferences, and a proposal to improve the way the text is displayed on the screen. Spanish and English were tested during the investigation, but the tool allows us to easily install dozens of new languages based on models trained for Coqui STT.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer NatureCanary Islands Agency for Research, Innovation and Information Society of the Ministry of Economy, Knowledge and Employment and by the European Social Fund (ESF) Integrated Operational Program of the Canary Islands 2014–2020, Axis 3 Priority Topic 74 (85%)PERGAMEX ACTIVE project, Ref. RTI2018- 096986-B-C32, funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation. SpainAgencia Canaria de Investigación, Innovación y Sociedad de la Información (TESIS2020010113

The evolution of the usability concept as an indicator of software quality

Technological advances in the field of information and interactive systems mean that increasing numbers of factors and criteria are considered to assess quality during the design, development and evaluation process. In this context, concepts such as quality of use and user experience have appeared and in many cases are replacing or supplementing existing usability properties to identify the quality of the interaction process. In this paper we describe and analyze the evolution of the different concepts to identify the quality of the interaction on information systems and we help to characterize and locate each quality factor in one dimension and a specific range of the process of use, and consider the relationships and overlap between these concepts

Validation and Psychometric Properties of the Gameplay-Scale for Educative Video Games in Spanish Children

The knowledge of evaluation instruments to determine the level of gameplay of schoolchildren is very important at this time. A systematic review has been carried out in this study. The aim of this paper is to investigate the psychometric properties of a study of a sample of Spanish gamers. Two hundred and thirty-seven children (mean age: 11.2 +/- 1.17 years, range: 10-12 years, 59.5% female) completed the Gameplay-Scale to discover their opinions after a game session with a serious educational game. The final scale consisted of three factors. The fit for factor 1 (usability) was 0.712, the fit for factor 2 was 0.702 (satisfaction), the fit for factor 3 was 0.886 (empathy) and the overall fit was 0.868. A positive and direct relationship could be observed between all the dimensions of the developed scale. The greatest correlation strength is shown between satisfaction and empathy (r = 0.800; p < 0.005), followed by satisfaction and usability (r = 0.180; p < 0.05) and the association between empathy and usability (r = 0.140; p < 0.05). In summary, the results of the present study support the use of the Gameplay-Scale as a valid and reliable measure of the game experience of youth populations. These results demonstrate strong psychometric properties so that the Gameplay-Scale appears to be a valid instrument for children in different contexts where an educational video game is used, analyzing its usability/“playability” in terms of learning to use it, game satisfaction, and empathy.This research is supported by the Andalusian Research Program under the project P11-TIC-7486 co-funded by FEDER, together with TIN2014-56494-C4-3-P and TEC2015-68752 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER also

Diseño de videojuegos orientado a la educación emocional

Uno de los aspectos actuales en la educación infantil es, lo que se denomina, educación en emociones. Los niños tienen dificultad en saber qué emoción están teniendo y, por tanto, tampoco son capaces de comunicársela a los padres, tutores o educadores. Por otro lado, se ha demostrado que el uso de la tecnología, y en concreto, de videojuegos educativos es útil para el aprendizaje de distintas materias. En este trabajo presentamos un nuevo componente a añadir en la arquitectura PLAGER-VG que permita crear juegos con el fin de poder generar y, así, enseñar a los menores, las emociones básicas

Diseño y desarrollo de experiencias lúdicas pervasivas geolocalizadas

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo principal ofrecer una visión específica sobre los retos de diseño de juegos pervasivos potenciando tres pilares básicos en ellos: uso de distintas fuentes de información, diversidad del área de juego e interconexión de distintos perfiles de jugadores. Esencialmente, en este trabajo presentamos cómo llevar a cabo el diseño de un juego pervasivo geolocalizado, poniendo como ejemplo el uso de una Yincana. Este campo ofrece nuevos retos y desafíos para conseguir el éxito a nivel de interacción en base a unir elementos lúdicos basado en sistemas de juegos y nuevos paradigmas como son la computación móvil, la realidad aumentada y mecanismos de geoposicionamiento interior y exterior. Finalmente se presenta las conclusiones del diseño y su puesta en práctica con un grupo de usuarios/as

Gamification Patterns: A Catalog to Enhance the Learning Motivation

Currently, the gamification has been a tool used in many contexts, in order to improve the user experiences, playability, among others. However, it just not has been focused in entertainment, but also this knowledge area has been applied from other perspectives like health, tourism and education. In fact, the traditional teaching methodology does not generate enough motivation in students to approach their learning and training objectives, that is why in this work we provide a patterns catalog of gamification that increase student motivation through its implementation in activities both inside and outside of classroom with the support of mobile devices and game applications. Besides, we show the outcomes of an experiment done with different student groups in an education institution in Colombia to evaluate its impact on the student motivation

Effect of an Intervention Program Based on Active Video Games and Motor Games on Health Indicators in University Students: A Pilot Study

(1) Background: High levels of physical inactivity caused by sedentary digital screen leisure constitute one of the main causes of the high levels of obesity observed in today’s society; (2) Methods: The present study aims to analyse the effect of a 12-week intervention program based on the application of active video games and motor games on health status indicators, problematic use of video games, and resilience capacity in university students. Besides, the content blocks of the Physical Education (PE) field are worked on through these devices, revealing their potential as an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) resource. A longitudinal study with a pre-experimental design with pretest–posttest measurements in a single group (n = 47) was performed, using as main instruments a Tanita TBF300®bioimpedance scale, the 20mSRT test for maximum oxygen consumption (VO2 max), the Adherence to a Mediterranean Diet Test (KIDMED), the Questionnaire for Experiences Related to Video games (QERV) and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC); (3) Results: The main results were a discrete improvement in the percentage of fat mass and VO2 max, representing a small effect size in both cases. The quality of the diet followed and the confidence and tolerance for adversity as a resilience factor were also improved, representing a medium size effect for this last variable; (4) Conclusions: Despite the limitations of this study as it does not have a control group, the main conclusions are that active video games and motor games can be a motivational resource to follow an active lifestyle, helping to improve health status indicators in young adults.This work has been funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain as part of the DISPERSA project (TIN2015-67149-C3-3-R) and the Precompetitive Research Projects for Young Researchers 2017—Modality B under de Grant PPJI_B-05 of the University of Granada

Introduciendo una historia interactiva en una experiencia geolocalizada

Pervasive games are one of the types of gaming experiences that currently causes the most impact on players. They break the usual environment of the game in a spatial, temporal or social dimension. This paper has the objective of integrate the narrative with the interactivity and the geolocalization of these games. This integration requires a model that represents and structures the story and its joining between the rest of the elements of the game. In addition, this model should allow us to analyze the effectiveness of the story and how it helps to create a good user experience. In this paper, we propose a strong structuring of the narrative that includes geolocalization support. Through an example of the design of an interactive geolocalized story, we explain several characteristics of the model that make possible the creation of a good interactive narrative.Actualmente, los juegos pervasivos son uno de los tipos de experiencia de juego que causan el mayor impacto en los jugadores, pues rompen el entorno usual del juego en su dimensión espacial, temporal o social. Este documento tiene el objetivo de proponer, en esos juegos, una integración de la narrativa con la interactividad y la geolocalización. Esta integración requiere un modelo que represente y estructure la historia y su fusión con el resto de elementos del juego. Además, ese modelo debe permitir analizar la efectividad de la historia y cómo ésta ayuda a crear una buena experiencia de usuario. En este trabajo, proponemos una fuerte estructuración de la narrativa que incluye soporte a la geolocalización. A través de un ejemplo de diseño de una historia interactiva geolocalizada, se explican las diferentes características del modelo que hacen posible la creación de buena narrativa interactiva