Memory Journalist: Creating Virtual Reality Exergames for the Treatment of Older Adults with Dementia

In this poster we show the intermediate results of our first therapy exergame for older adults with neurological diseases, in particular, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. It has been shown that regular exercises improve balance of older adults when performing everyday tasks. However, creating exergames for older adults with dementia leads to challenges when it comes to designing training tasks, which can be solved without the requirement to learn new modes and methods of interaction, since dementia patients are typically limited in acquiring new skills. Therefore, we co-developed novel virtual reality (VR) interactions together with patients and clinical experts, which can be easily performed by patients without extensive instructions. We introduce Memory Journalist, which is an exergame based on moderate complex motor-cognitive tasks. In this game patients need to memorize locations of landmarks and photograph them using a tracked 3D-printed wearable camera by exploiting simple motor tasks.