Games for elderly

Hester Anderiesen wants to stimulate people to take the stairs instead of the elevator with serious games. (photo: Tomas van Dijk)

Name: Hester Anderiesen (28)
Nationality: Dutch
Promoters: Professor Richard Goossens (IDE faculty), Professor Erik Scherder (faculty of neuropsychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Dr Marieke Sonneveld (IDE faculty)
Subject: Game elements in user-product interactions to motivate physical activity
Thesis defence: In three years 

“When older persons move to a nursing home facility, they often become very passive. The daily routines they were used to at home, like, for example, making coffee, preparing sandwiches and watering the plants, are quickly taken over by care professionals. Once these tasks are taken over by others, the elderly persons soon come to believe that they’re not capable of doing them anymore, which is often frustrating and even depressing. I want to motivate these older people to keep on doing their daily activities. Residents told me that for them, long-term health effects are not motivating factors for remaining active; therefore, the activity should be pleasurable and motivating itself.

I work with two other PhDs, Ellis Bartholomeus and Niko Vegt, and our common goal is to research how we can use games to change human behaviour. I will research how we can use game elements in the interaction between (older) persons and products or the environment, in order to simply make the activity more fun to do. Game elements include, for example, competition, challenge or exploration.

During the first year I will conduct several experiments aimed at understanding how different kinds of games can change the behaviour of people from different age groups. My goal is to motivate people to start an activity – therefore, the focus of my experiments will be the point of decision making. How can we use certain game elements to make the choice of taking the stairs more appealing than taking the elevator?

We think that we should use different game elements for older persons who are cognitively healthy or suffering from dementia. When we get older, the first part of our brain that declines is the prefrontal cortex, which occurs long before one would ever be diagnosed with dementia. We can stimulate this area with certain game elements and with physical activity. The prefrontal cortex is crucial for decision making, inhibition, motor behaviour and initiative. It’s very important to stimulate this brain region as much as possible, and as my promoter always says: use it or lose it!

I’m partially working at the faculty of clinical neuropsychology. Neuropsychologists have lots of knowledge that is useful for designers, knowledge about our cognitive processes that are related to behaviour and experiences. I very much like to tap into that knowledge. There is a huge difference between neuropsychologists and designers. Designers are often visually oriented. We get inspired by users, other designers, an exhibition or maybe a stroll on the beach. I doubt whether there is one designer that runs to his computer first thing in the morning to check Pubmed for new, inspiring publications. But there is definitely a huge amount of knowledge we can use to design better products.”