Augmented Reality for Older Adults: Exploring Acceptability of Virtual Coaches for Home-based Balance Training in an Aging Population
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), page 1--12 - 2020
Balance training has been shown to be effective in reducing
risks of falling, which is a major concern for older adults.
Usually, exercise programs are individually prescribed and
monitored by physiotherapeutic or medical experts. Unfortunately,
supervision and motivation of older adults during
home-based exercises cannot be provided on a large scale, in
particular, considering an ageing population. Augmented reality
(AR) in combination with virtual coaches could provide a
reasonable solution to this challenge.
We present a first investigation of the acceptance of an AR
coaching system for balance training, which can be performed
at home. In a human-centered design approach we developed
several mock-ups and prototypes, and evaluated them with
76 older adults. The results suggest that older adults find
the system encouraging and stimulating. The virtual coach
is perceived as an alive, calm, intelligent, and friendly human.
However, usability of the entire AR system showed a
significant negative correlation with participants’ age.
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BibTex references
@InProceedings{MSAGF20, author = "Mostajeran, Fariba and Steinicke, Frank and Ariza, Oscar and Gatsios, Dimitrios and Fotiadis, Dimitrios", title = "Augmented Reality for Older Adults: Exploring Acceptability of Virtual Coaches for Home-based Balance Training in an Aging Population", booktitle = "Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)", pages = "1--12", year = "2020", url = "http://basilic.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/Publications/2020/MSAGF20" }