Exploring Older Adults’ Experience of Neurorehabilitation in Virtual Reality within a University of the Third Age

Abstract

One of the areas where the commercially available contemporary immersive virtual reality technologies can be used for the common good is the neurorehabilitation of patients after events such as a stroke. The L-NeRVEn distributed software system represents a solution where a patient, under the supervision of a therapist, may undergo training involving motor imagery tasks with a disabled upper limb and electroencephalography to determine the success of the task. During the development of such system, an extensive user–experience–oriented testing is necessary. Here, an interesting group of potential users is older people, especially in the role of the patient. To obtain a relatively consistent and enthusiastic group of such users, this paper proposes to combine the testing with activities of University of the Third Age study programs. The paper also reports on a pilot implementation of such testing with n=12 participants and presents the results based on direct observation, video recordings, Igroup Presence Questionnaire, and Virtual Reality Sickness Questionnaire.


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