Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: Apr 27, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Apr 27, 2021 - Jun 22, 2021
Date Accepted: Sep 24, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Immersive Virtual Reality Exergames for People Living with Dementia: Working Through a User-Centered Co-Creation Process as a Multi-Stakeholder Team During the COVID-19 Pandemic
ABSTRACT
Background:
Advancements in supporting personalized healthcare and wellbeing using virtual reality (VR) has created opportunities to use immersive games to support a healthy lifestyle for persons living with dementia (PLWD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Collaboratively designing exercise-video games (exergames) as a multi-stakeholder team is fundamental to creating games that are attractive, effective, and accessible.
Objective:
This research explores the use of participatory design methods that involve PLWD in long-term care facilitates, exercise professionals, content developers, game designers, and researchers in the creation of VR exergames targeting physical activity promotion for PLWD/MCI.
Methods:
Conceptualization, collaborative design, and playtesting activities were carried out to design VR exergames to engage PLWD in exercises to promote upper-limb flexibility, strength and aerobic endurance
Results:
Our results demonstrate how different stakeholders contribute to the design of VR exergames that consider/complement complex needs, preferences, and motivators of an underrepresented group of end-users as well as game design elements that reflect feedback for therapists and researchers.
Conclusions:
This study provides evidence that collaborative multi-stakeholder design results in more tailored and context-aware VR games for PLWD. The insights and lessons learned in from this research can be used by others to co-design games, including remote engagement techniques that were used during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Citation
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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.