Acceptance of a targeted exergame program by elderly

In a project a targeted exergame for elderly was developed and tested. The goal was to find out how our old elderly users received a combined exergame program, whether they felt that this was real exercise for them, and what type of exercises they preferred. The three-year project applied user centred design, and the exergame consists of seven mini-games. First the elderly users played them all, one mini-game at a time. Five of the mini-games were sequenced into a 4.5 minutes long exercise program, and ten elderly users played through the program and then went through a semi-structured interview about how they perceived the program. All seven minigames were then used in the final twelve minutes long exercise program, and seven elderly users played through the program and then participated in group discussions about how they perceived the program. The users reacted positively to the combined exergame program. This paper describes the games and trials.