The work: "Using educative-games authoring platforms and 2D simulation for developing screen-based narutalistic neuropsychological assessments" will be presented in the LXVI Chilean Congress of Neurology, Psychiatry and Neurosurgery, taking place in Pucón (Chile) on November 9-12th, 2011.

This is a collaborative effort led by scientists from the Center of Advanced research in Education at the University of Chile the e-UCM research group at Complutense University of Madrid and the Laboratory of Computer Science at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

They make use of the open-source, low cost adventure-game authoring platform e-Adventure for developing a new kind of naturalistic assessments, more ecologically valid and easier to use and develop than other approaches.

One of its main innovations is the use of "touch" interfaces and high portability by using Android-based tablets to deploy the assessments in real clinical settings. Currently, the researchers are planning to begin a clinical validation study, with real patients, to evaluate the feasibility of this approach.