An Augmented Reality Game for Helping Elderly to Perform Physical Exercises at Home

Abstract

People are living longer nowadays. Unfortunately, this positive tendency is marred by various age-related health issues, which people experience. Falling is one of the most serious and common of them. Falls negatively influences elderly’ everyday living and significantly decreases quality of their life. Physical exercises is a proven method for preventing falls. However, it is only effective when training is regular and exercise techniques are correct. This paper presents a prototype of an augmented reality exergame for elderly people to perform physical exercise at home. The research is focusing on developing a solution for both above-mentioned issues: augmentation with Microsoft Kinect and various sensors assists in creating a safe game environment, which can helps to perform exercises with right technique; gamification elements contribute to users’ motivation to train regularly. A user-centered design approach was adopted to guide the design and development iterative process. User testing of the first prototype was performed and demonstrated positive attitudes from participants. Feedback from user testing will be used for the next development iterations.