An environment to collect personal memories of older adults and use them to personalise serious games with humanoid robots

One of the goals of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions is to be able to stimulate the cognitive resources of older adults. An innovative way to address such stimulation is the use of serious games delivered through humanoid robots, as they can provide an engaging way to perform exercises useful for training human memory, attention, processing, and planning activities. This paper presents an approach to supporting cognitive stimulation based on personal memories. The humanoid robot can exhibit different behaviours using various modalities, and propose the games in a way personalised to specific individuals' requirements, preferences, abilities, and motivations, which can vary among older adults, and even dynamically evolve over time for the same person depending on changing user needs and health conditions. Using personal memories associated with facts and events that occurred in older adults life in the serious games can increase their engagement, and thus potentially reduce the cognitive training drop-out.