Familiarity Design in Exergames for Elderly

Rehabilitation exergames aim to help the elderly recover from their deteriorated capabilities due to aging. Research suggests that exergames may effectively engage the elderly in physical activities. However, new technologies and devices normally used to develop the exergames may be over complex and difficult for the elderly to use, mainly because the hardware and software components involved in modern exergames appear unfamiliar or even alien to the elderly mentally. Moreover, the elderly consider the investment to acquire the unfamiliar technology is too high. Therefore, the study of familiarity issues of the elderly is important and necessary to guide the interaction design of new technologies so that they can be built upon the elderly’s prior knowledge of real world interactions to help the elderly to apply their existing skills to a new domain. In this paper, we propose three dimensions of familiarity design and the approach to design familiar exergames for the elderly. By following this approach, we hope to increase the usability of the exergames that the elderly can naturally interact with. For case study, we introduce the design principles followed when implementing the Virtual Escape Exergame to illustrate the usage of our proposed familiarity design approach to develop an exergame in a familiar virtual environment for the elderly.