A Systematic Review on Serious Games in Attention Rehabilitation and Their Effects

Abstract

Attention is a basic and main mental task and can play an important role in the functioning of other brain abilities such as intelligence, memory, learning, and perception, and its deficit occurs in 80% of patients with traumatic brain injury. The use of game-based tools for rehabilitation is rapidly expanding. Cognitive rehabilitation via video games is an emerging hot topic in cognitive science. Serious games serve a specific purpose in addition to entertainment. They can be more engaging than exercises since they replace reward and motivation systems with real-world motivations as a complement for rehabilitation activities. This study was aimed at identifying and categorizing serious computer games used for attention rehabilitation and evaluating their effects. Six electronic databases (Scopus, PubMed, ISI, Embase, IEEE, and Cochrane) were searched in August 2021. The search strategy consisted of three main concepts of “serious game”, “cognitive deficits”, and “cognitive rehabilitation”. The inclusion criteria were (1) journal articles, (2) English language, (3) being published in the last 10 years, (4) human participants, and (5) game-based intervention. In the 30 included studies, 22 unique games were utilized for attention rehabilitation. Lumosity (20%), Brain Age (Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training) (10%), and MoHRS (6.66%) were the most common games among the studies. There were (57%) casual, (23%) action, (10%) simulation, and (10%) multiple genres. Of the 47 tools used in the studies, 5 utilized cross-modal oddball attention tasks, 4 utilized game performance, 3 utilized the paced auditory serial additional test (PASAT), and the rest employed other tools. A total of 73 outcome measures were related to attention, 42 measures did not have significant results, 30 were significantly improved, 1 was significantly deteriorated, and 4 articles did not have any specific measures for attention evaluation. Thus, the results revealed the positive effect of serious games on attention. However, issues such as absence of scientific teams, the variety of the disorders that cause defects, the variety of criteria, differences in measurements, lack of long-term follow-up, insufficient RCT studies, and small sample sizes should be considered when designing, developing, and using game-based systems to prevent bias.

Presence in video games: A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of game design choices

“…Games for which entertainment is not the primary goal (e.g., serious game, game-based learning, rehabilitation game, physical training exergame) are designed to help the user achieve a primary goal (e.g., academic learning, training, cognitive rehabilitation, skill enhancement, behavioral change, etc.) that is not inherently related to the player-video game interaction (e.g., Krath et al, 2021;Shahmoradi et al, 2022). The present review aimed to focus on player experience data (including presence) collected in situations uniquely designed to achieve optimal player experience.…”

Features and effects of computer-based games on cognitive impairments in children with autism spectrum disorder: an evidence-based systematic literature review

“…Computerized games can be more engaging than routine exercises, because they replace reward and motivation systems with real-world motivations as a complement to rehabilitation activities. People can be immersed in the game world, and their ability and knowledge can be improved without any danger [ 31 , 32 ].…”

“…et al In this contribution, the authors provide an overview of applying serious games in attention rehabilitation in patients with traumatic brain injury. This review, however, focused specially on other disorders, not ASD [ 31 ]. Patricia Mesa-Gresa et al published a systematic review that focused mainly on the effectiveness of virtual reality for children and adolescents with ASD.…”

Application of Serious Games in Health Care: Scoping Review and Bibliometric Analysis

“…Schöbel et al (15) presented a bibliometric analysis of existing literature on game concepts in digital learning and Hallinger et al (16) conducted a bibliometric analysis on simulations and SGs in educating for sustainability, that both studies focused on the application of SGs in education. Also, some recent systematic reviews have reported the effectiveness of SGs in the fields of rehabilitation (17), psychotherapy (18), and education (19). There were several scoping review exploring SGs for rehabilitation in terms of stroke rehabilitation (20), upper extremity rehabilitation (21), musculoskeletal diseases rehabilitation (22), and so on.…”