Towards Developing a Therapeutic Serious Game Design Model for Stimulating Cognitive Abilities: A Case for Children with Speech and Language Delay

摘要

Recently, serious games aimed at cognitive therapy have been gaining increasing importance in general health applications, creating new possibilities for various groups, including children, to access new forms of treatment. However, to develop therapeutic serious games that stimulate the cognitive abilities of children with speech and language delay (CSLD), the needs of this group and a few other issues must be considered. Therefore, this paper aims to identify the problems affecting the cognitive functions of CSLD as well as their needs, to assist in the development of a serious game for CSLD. We conducted a preliminary study through a semi-structured interview with experts in the area of therapy. Our results indicate that CSLD indeed have major difficulties that affect the development of their cognitive abilities such as memory, attention, perception, problem solving, decision making, language, learning, and reasoning. In addition, CSLD also lack preverbal and motor skills. These findings reinforce the need to propose a model for therapeutic serious game design that stimulates the cognitive abilities of CSLD.