M3 Master CogniCity A Serious Game Suite to help enhance cognitive abilities

How good our cognitive abilities are has a significant impact on how good we perceive our own life quality.¹

Unfortunately some health conditions and their treatments can lead to a decline in these abilities. For example, imagine a teenager who has to spend a lot of time in the hospital due to a chronic illness and is unable to attend school regularly. Or a young adult who suffers from a heart disease and has to take regular medication which can affect their cognitive abilities.

To fight the potential decline in those abilities, it is important to train them regularly. However, the training should be fun and engaging to keep the motivation high. This is where CogniCity comes in: a game suite that provides interactive and adaptive minigames to help improve cognitive abilities in a fun and engaging way.

Source: ¹: Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, “Lebensqualität und Gesundheit - Subjektive Perspektiven von selbstauskunftsfähigen Pflegeheimbewohnern - eine qualitative Studie”, 2014

Embedded in a research project of the Freie Universität Berlin, we aim to develop a game suite that is specifically designed to support individuals who are in danger of cognitive decline due to health conditions or their treatments. Our goal is to provide a fun and engaging way to train cognitive abilities, while also keeping track of the progress made. CogniCity provides a variety of minigames that can be used to train different cognitive abilities, such as logical thinking, working memory or spatial thinking.

While the core of the team consists of five HTW students, experts at the Freie Universität Berlin supported the project by answering our psychological and mathematical questions. This way we were able to create a scientifically based solution.

To make use of the different skill sets in our group, we split the work into three categories:

• Game Design & UI/UX
• Game Development
• Backend Development

We used an agile workflow and assigned new tasks dynamically to ensure an efficient development process.