Investigating the usability of interactive physical activity games for elderly: A pilot study

Abstract

In this study, we intend to investigate the elderly's feedback towards the usability of commercial games and a physical activity game developed by our project collaborator, Puuha Group, Finland. We conducted a pilot usability testing of interactive physical activity games with two groups of elderly who are moderately active and less active in their daily lives. We used commercially available Xbox One's Climbing game and PS3's Play Move Tennis game, and SportWall game developed by Puuha Group. We investigated the usability of each game and collected the elderly's feedback towards the individual games and their user experiences in gameplay and interaction. The findings showed that moderately active elderly group could participate well in the usability testing whereas the less active elderly group could merely play the game in the first session and they could not continue the gameplay because of their limited physical and cognitive ability. With regard to the games, elderly preferred SportWall's skateboarding game to the commercial games because of its simplicity and ease of play. According to the elderly's feedback, Kinect for Xbox One is the easiest for them whereas they claimed that PS3's Play Move controller is the hardest to control the game. The findings from this pilot study can provide us useful design insights as well as the elderly's perspectives on digital games for physical rehabilitation. Moreover, these findings are helpful for further implementation and enhancement of the games in our future project.