Acceptance of immersive head-mounted virtual reality in older adults

Hanne Huygelier,Vero Vanden Abeele,Céline R Gillebert,Raymond Van Ee,Brenda Schraepen

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-41200-6

Abstract

Immersive virtual reality has become increasingly popular to improve the assessment and treatment of health problems. This rising popularity is likely to be facilitated by the availability of affordable headsets that deliver high quality immersive experiences. As many health problems are more prevalent in older adults, who are less technology experienced, it is important to know whether they are willing to use immersive virtual reality. In this study, we assessed the initial attitude towards head-mounted immersive virtual reality in 76 older adults who had never used virtual reality before. Furthermore, we assessed changes in attitude as well as self-reported cybersickness after a first exposure to immersive virtual reality relative to exposure to time-lapse videos. Attitudes towards immersive virtual reality changed from neutral to positive after a first exposure to immersive virtual reality, but not after exposure to time-lapse videos. Moreover, self-reported cybersickness was minimal and had no association with exposure to immersive virtual reality. These results imply that the contribution of VR applications to health in older adults will neither be hindered by negative attitudes nor by cybersickness.

Highlights

Virtual reality (VR) has received great interest from the health community, as it offers many opportunities to improve the assessment and treatment of health problems[1,2,3,4,5,6]
Given the rising popularity of VR for the assessment and treatment of a variety of health conditions that are common in older adults[1,2,3,4,5,6], and the emergence of new low-cost high-quality immersive head-mounted displays, it is important to understand acceptance of HMD-VR in this population
We tested older adults of a broad range of ages, education levels, technology experience, global cognitive statuses and levels of independence (Table 1), as we assumed that these participants may be more representative of many immersive VR health applications’ end-users than samples mainly consisting of community dwellers or baby-boomers

Summary

Introduction

Virtual reality (VR) has received great interest from the health community, as it offers many opportunities to improve the assessment and treatment of health problems[1,2,3,4,5,6]. The efficacy of VR health applications has been studied in diverse clinical populations[11,12,13,14,15,16,36], the assessment of the user acceptance, experience and safety of these approaches is often limited[37] It has been evaluated whether stroke survivors are more sensitive to cybersickness due to HMD-VR exposure than age-matched healthy controls in a small sample by Kang and colleagues[21] and whether objective performance in an HMD-VR driver simulation was associated with subjective comfort level by Simone and colleagues[38]. To our knowledge, no studies have reported on the acceptance of HMD-VR in older populations

Methods

Results

Conclusion