Doctors and physical therapists recommend their older patients maintain an exercise regimen, but older adults often find this difficult to do either due to physical challenges or motivational challenges. This project is investigating ways to design and develop exergames (“exercise games”) for older adults by taking into account their attitudes towards exercise, staying active, technology, and games. We are working with local seniors who have varying levels of interest and motivation regarding exercise or games to learn best how to appeal to a wide range of potential users. This project began at UMBC, where I advised Samyukta Ganesan, a former UMBC HCC Master’s student, on this project as an independent study and then independent research.
Check out our full project website! We are looking for new students interested in working on this topic! (You must already be a UF student.) Contact me at lanthony [at] cise [dot] ufl [dot] edu.
Papers:
- Ganesan, S. and Anthony, L. 2012. Using the Kinect to Encourage Older Adults to Exercise: A Prototype. Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’2012), Austin, TX, 5 May 2012, p.2297-2302. [pdf]
last revised 03/20/2014
Lisa Anthony 