Potential of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Technologies to Promote Wellbeing in Older Adults

Older adults face significant loss and limitations in terms of mobility, cognitive ability, and socialization. By using augmented reality and virtual reality technologies they have the potential to overcome such loss and limitations, and to eventually improve their quality of life. However, this group is often excluded in augmented reality and virtual reality deployment. Further, limited studies address their challenges when using augmented reality and virtual reality. Therefore, for a critical review of augmented reality and virtual reality for older adults, we developed a framework to evaluate related factors, including physical, social, and psychological wellbeing. Through the critical review, we identified that most augmented reality and virtual reality studies focus on physical wellbeing of older adults but also make substantial efforts to increase their psychological wellbeing. Fun factors that would motivate them are also extensively considered. Further, social isolation continues to be a significant issue for older adults, but the appropriate content to increase their social wellbeing is insufficient, although many commercial products have been developed. The contribution of the present study is to provide a contextual framework and an evaluation framework for the critical review of augmented reality and virtual reality technologies to promote wellbeing in older adults. This study also suggests the augmented reality and virtual reality research direction for studies on this group by identifying the research gap through the critical review process. Lastly, this study investigates design directions of augmented reality and virtual reality for older adults by introducing challenges and design issues that emerged through the critical review.