Evaluation of a new serious game based multitasking assessment tool for cognition and activities of daily living: Comparison with a real cooking task

Multitasking is present in all activities of daily living and needs precise assessment to allow ecological patient-specific intervention. The use of multitasking in diagnostic tools remains rare, due to the difficulties of implementing this in laboratory settings. To overcome these difficulties, Serious Games represent a good surrogate method as it offers the possibility to recreate a functional setting in a safe daily living environment and allows testing and quantifying multitasking performances in an enjoyable and motivating way. The purpose of the study was to investigate the potential of a new Serious Game based multitasking assessment tool by examining the cognitive validity and the real life representability of the tool. Eighteen healthy elderly controls participated in the study. They were asked to execute a cooking activity in the Serious Game and in real life, and were assessed using a neuropsychological test battery. Results showed that performance on the virtual cooking task was associated with multiple cognitive measures and that performances in the virtual task were highly representative of what participants did in real life. This tool is a first step toward including ecologically valid measures for a comprehensive assessment of healthy elderly controls and may help to assesses elderly patients with diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.