Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 23, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 24, 2018 - Apr 11, 2018
Date Accepted: May 1, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
The Social Effects of Exergames on Older Adults: Systematic Review and Metric Analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Recently, many studies have been conducted to investigate the effects of exergames on the social well-being of older adults.
Objective:
The aim of this paper is to synthesize existing studies and provide an overall picture on the social effects of exergames on older adults.
Methods:
A comprehensive literature search with inclusive criteria was conducted in major social science bibliographic databases. The characteristics of exergames, participants, methodology, as well as outcome measurements were extracted from the relevant studies included in the review. The bibliometric and altmetric outreach of the included studies were also investigated.
Results:
A total of 10 studies were included in the review, with 8 studies having used the Nintendo Wii platform. Most of the studies recruited healthy older adults from local communities or senior activity centers. Three groups of social-related outcomes have been identified, including emotion-related, behavior-related, and attitude-related outcomes. A metric analysis has shown that the emotion-related and behavior-related outcomes received high attention from both the academic community and social media platforms.
Conclusions:
Overall, the majority of exergame studies demonstrated promising results for enhanced social well-being, such as reduction of loneliness, increased social connection, and positive attitudes towards others. The paper also provided implications for health care researchers and exergame designers.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.