A Serious Game for Training Verbal Resilience to Doorstep Scams

People are frequently confronted with scams; swindlers trying to gain your trust to get hold of your personal information, money or belongings. Elderly people are especially vulnerable to these tricks, that typically occur at the front door, street or on the phone. We have developed a virtual training environment to teach people how to handle these situations and learn them to increase their verbal resilience. The training is implemented as a tablet application and consists of six scenarios that are likely to occur in daily life. Participants are placed in a dialogue with a virtual character and may interact by choosing an answer from a fixed multiple-choice menu or by speaking the answer aloud. A speech recognition module is able to detect the level of assertiveness and provides immediate feedback to the user’s performance. In this paper, we present the implementation of the virtual training application. To evaluate the prototype a focus group was organized, consisting of potential end users. The outcomes were mainly positive and the provided feedback will be incorporated into the final version.