Smart Tales: An Awareness Game for Ambient Assisted Living

Abstract

Despite the progress in ambient assisted living (AAL), the general audience is still mostly unaware of this term as well as of its purpose, enabling technologies, and potential. As a consequence, there are often misconceptions about AAL and smart homes, and the acceptance of AAL technologies is still too low. To cope with these problems, this paper presents a publicly available awareness game called Smart Tales, whose goal is to enhance the familiarity of its players with the notion and core concepts of AAL. In Smart Tales, the player has the role of an assisted patient in a smart home, and gets to learn about AAL and its technologies while trying to cheat the sensors that are placed in the house. In addition to presenting the design of the game following the Serious Games Design Assessment framework from the literature, we present results on engagement and learning that we obtained through a formative evaluation with ten users.