Rivit: A Digital Game to Cognitively Train and Entertain Heart Failure Patients

People with heart failure tend to develop cognitive impairments, anxiety and constant boredom due to the time they have to wait to get surgery while being hospitalised. Serious games may assist these in improving their cognitive abilities and get distracted while waiting for surgery. In this paper, we present Rivit, a collection mini-games aimed at improving cognition and mood of heart failure patients, which is still under development. We present the current state of the game and a preliminary user experience evaluation. The aim of this evaluation is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of Rivit so that it can be tested with real patients at a later stage. Although the evaluation was not conducted with real heart failure patients, we found that elderly people may need more effort than young people to understand game goals. Our work may serve as a basis for developers of games aimed at heart failure patients during early development stages.