Restorative Virtual Environment Design for Augmenting Nursing Home Rehabilitation

With increasing age, muscle strength decreases excessively rapidly if physical activity is not maintained. However, physical activity is increasingly difficult with aging. This is due to balance, strength or coordination difficulties, arthritis, etc. Moreover, many nursing home residents become unable to experience natural surroundings. Augmenting a conventional biking exercise with a recreational virtual environment (RVE) has shown to serve as an intrinsic motivation contributor to exercise for nursing home residents. RVEs might be able to provide some of the health benefits that regular nature experiences do. More studies on content of proper custom designs for RVEs are necessary. This paper reviews the background for RVE design, describes four custom RVE designs for recreational VE exploration and presents user preferences among nursing home users concerning content and other pivotal design considerations

Augmented Exercise Biking with Virtual Environments for Elderly Users:Considerations on the use of auditory feedback

Virtual reality (VR) has been shown to function well as an assistive technology to physical therapy for elderly users. Elderly users, and more specifically retirement home residents, form a unique user group in this field, due to their characteristics and demands. In a case study, retirement home residents used an audio-visual virtual environment (VE) augmentation for an exercise bike. Besides a visual display, a soundscape was played to the subjects using headphones. The soundscape was not no- ticed wand the headphones were found to be obtrusive. In this paper, we consider and discuss possible approaches to alternative auditory and haptic delivery methods for future studies. These nonvisual displays need to fit the requirements and limitations of the retirement home subjects who are to exercise using the VE-based augmenta- tion from the case study