A Preliminary Study on Application of Tangible User Interface and Augmented Reality Technology with Table Game and Hand-Eye Coordination Operation Tasks in the Fields of Memory and Visuospatial Perception for the Elderly

• Published in: Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Technology in Everyday Living Vol. 13331; pp. 277 - 289
• Main Authors: Wang, Li-Lan, Lee, I.-Jui
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2022; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Cognitive ability; Hand-eye coordination; Memory; Tangible Augmented Reality; Tangible user interface; The elderly; Visuospatial perception
• ISBN: 3031056531; 9783031056536
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-05654-3_19

As the elderly ages, their memory, judgement and spatial orientation and cognition gradually decline. These declining abilities can result in different levels of problems in everyday life and eventually lead to a decline in the quality of life of the elderly. Therefore, this study focuses on discussing the ways to strengthen the memory and visuospatial perception skills of the elderly through simple game mechanisms. It is known from previous works that the application of a “Tangible User Interface” combined with “Augmented Reality” (Tangible Augmented Reality, TAR) technology, together with game tasks and hand-eye coordination exercises, will help gamers to achieve better interface operability and comprehension. However, it remains to be seen whether such advantages can be equally reflected in the ‘memory’ and ‘visuospatial perception’ abilities of the elderly. Therefore, a total of six subjects of middle-advanced age over 60 years old were recruited for this study and each of them was provided with each: (1) Tablet computer game without TAR operation (the game is operated entirely on the tablet computer), and (2) An interactive game with TAR operation (which combines virtual and physical operational objects). The participants were asked to complete six cognitive scales (mental load, game operation, cognitive load, self-expression, visuospatial perception, and memory degree) after completing the two kinds of games for the purpose of assessing whether the TAR game task was equally operative and comprehensible for the elderly in terms of “memory” and “visuospatial perception”. The results show that TAR games do have better operability and is more easily comprehensible, which is also reflected in the performance of the elderly in terms of “memory” and “visuospatial perception”, with an average score of 5.55 or higher (out of 7) in memory, judgement and orientation cognition. The reason is that TAR games with physical operation is conducive to improving the spatial cognition and cognitive ability of the operator through hand-eye coordination, and this advantage is indirectly reflected by the operation and performance of games that require invoking memory, judgement and directional cognition. Therefore, it can be concluded that TAR games have advantages over non-TAR tablet games in terms of memory, spatial cognition and perceptual judgement and processing training for middle-advanced age users. More complete data support shall be gained for such result by a larger number of case recruitment trials, which is to be promoted and fulfilled in future studies.