During the month of March 2019, the EuroAGE Project – Innovative Initiatives for the Promotion of Active Aging in the EUROACE Region (www.euroage.eu) held several sessions to validate a game to train the cognitive abilities of the elderly and also uses a robot. It was developed by the IPCB team through its robotics laboratory.
In the Adriano Godinho home of Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Castelo Branco, four validation sessions were carried out by the team of the IPCB robotics laboratory. In total, 28 elderly people from the institution participate. The game aims to train the cognitive abilities of the elderly and has various levels of difficulty, where they detect various shapes and colors to place in pre-defined places in an arena. The developed system interacts automatically with the elderly, calculating their level of performance, through analysis, by artificial vision, of the places where the elderly person places the objects in the arena. In the last level of the game, the elderly interact with objects of various shapes and colors, through a robot that is controlled by the elderly, using a tablet. In this last game, the objective is to push with the robot, the objects, placed in the arena, out of this. All devices were developed by the team of the robotics laboratory, made up of Professor Paulo J. Sequeira Gonçalves, and by the Bernardo Lourenço and Samuel Santos engineers, research fellows.
The validation of the game in terms of the cognitive, social and motor development of the elderly before and during the experiments was monitored by Lic. Simão Silva, currently a student of the Master in Social Gerontology, and a project fellow. It is supervised by Professors Cristina Pereira, Maria João Moreira and Vítor Pinheira.
The EuroAGE Project (Innovative Initiatives for the Promotion of Active Aging in the EUROACE Region) aims to promote active aging through physical, cognitive and emotional activity with the aim of improving the quality of life and increasing healthy life expectancy. basis of the scientific and technical knowledge of both countries. Also involved in the project are the Jesus Invasion Circulation Center Jesús Usón de Cáceres, the Polytechnic of Guarda, the ISR of the University of Coimbra, the Sociosanitary Cluster of Extremadura-Cáceres and the ROBOLAB of the University of Extremadura
The EuroAGE project is co-financed at 75% by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the INTERREG V-A Spain-Portugal Program (POCTEP) 2014-2020.
