Gaming Projects for Cognitive Testing in an Undergraduate Mobile Healthcare Technology Course

This Research to Practice Full Paper describes the research and development experience of building two brain training mobile Android applications as part of an undergraduate mobile healthcare technology course. Along with faculty mentors, project teams researched that symptoms like loss of cognition, memory, and reasoning are indicators of the early onset of dementia, Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease. Active brain training has been shown to alleviate some of these symptoms. Using this knowledge and the skills learned in the course, student teams designed Android mobile gaming applications with cloud back-end infrastructures to train the brain. Observations about the class composition, together with units of instruction to facilitate successful project implementation and critical thinking in an ethnically diverse STEM student pool of an R3 University are described.