Developing MMSE-Based Serious Games to Enhance Cognitive Function in the Elderly: An Exploratory Study

As the aging population grows rapidly and the number of individuals with dementia continues to increase, early screening and preventive cognitive training have become increasingly important.The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), the most widely used dementia screening tool, assesses five core cognitive domains: orientation, language, attention/concentration, memory, and executive function.This study presents the design and implementation of a cognitive-enhancement serious game in which each of the five MMSE cognitive domains maps primarily to a single game, rather than having one game stimulate multiple domains simultaneously, as in most prior studies.Specifically, a scenario-based rehabilitation game trains place orientation through an entry-point question about the user's current location; a crossword puzzle trains both time orientation, through an entry-point date question, and language ability, through hint-based word retrieval; a garden-decoration game based on tangram pieces trains concentration and visuoconstructional ability; a food-matching memory game trains registration and recall; and a fly-catching reaction game trains executive function and processing speed.Each game's design is grounded in prior empirical studies specific to its cognitive domain, reviewed in the theoretical background.This primary-domain mapping structure (with the crossword puzzle additionally combining a secondary, entry-point orientation question) is expected to allow future research to measure and verify the training effect of each cognitive domain independently.