Gender Specificity in Exergaming for Therapy and Rehabilitation

As IT products' developers seek to enhance the level of user experience, more attention is given to consideration the personal characteristics and preferences of the target audience. For exergaming software that is increasingly employed for medical therapy and rehabilitation, motivation and satisfaction of its users is of particular importance, due to the need to ensure its regular usage. The novelty of the VR/AR environment is seen as a positive factor for the above, but the potentially negative reactions to the VR immersion do not gain enough research attention. In our paper, we explore gender differences in users' experience with VR-based exergaming (VRE). We describe the experimental study that we performed with 54 subjects who engaged with Beat Saber game in VR, tasked with crashing various flying blocks with two light sabers. The game score reflected the objective exergaming performance, while we also registered the subjects' self-assessment emotional state data during the VRE experience and their personal characteristics. Our results suggest that the gender-related differences were rather minor: for men, frustration affected the coordination of sensory and motor activities; while for women frustration, personal anxiety and rigidity were related to the decrease in anxiety caused by exergaming. We believe that our findings could be of usage to VR/AR content designers seeking to cater more personalized products target audience and may help to improve VR programs of neurorehabilitation due to mental disorders or cardiovascular diseases.