Towards Older Adults Cognitive and Emotional Stimulation via Robotic Cognitive Games

The paper presents and discusses a framework to promote older adults cognitive and emotional stimulation via Robotic Cognitive Games. The work is based on classic games for older adults, e.g., to place objects in pre-defined positions in an arena, where the authors introduce a robot in the games. The paper not only presents the robotic games, but also the methodology developed to properly introduce them to older adults in a nursing home. As such, the paper proposes three cognitive robotic games, a methodology to assess the success of its introduction to older adults, keeping in mind cognitive and emotional aspects. To validate the proposed robotic solution, experimental tests were performed in a nursing home. A prior cognitive and emotional test was done with older adults to have a ground truth to compare with after a batch of games was completed by each older adult. The results and their discussion validate the robotic games approach, and also the methodology used for its introduction in the nursing home.