Exploring the Potential of Virtual Reality for the Elderly and People with Disabilities

Nowadays society is facing a process where life expectancy is gradually but constantly increasing. As a result, the group of elderly people is growing to become one of the most significant in the entire population (Giannakouris, 2008). This also means that the prevalence of physical and cognitive impairments is increasing in proportion. Elderly people usually suffer from vision deficiencies (yellowish and blurred image), hearing limitations (especially at high frequencies) motor impairments (for selection, execution and feedback) and slight deterioration of their cognitive skills (Lillo & Moreira, 2004). In this context, providing the elderly and people with disabilities (E&D) with accessible systems and services that could improve their level of independence and thus enhance their quality of life has become a must for ICT –Information and Communication Technologies– developers such as usability engineers and interaction designers. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is one of the solutions that are beginning to address this technological challenge. The AAL concept represents a specific, user-oriented type of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). It comprises technological and organisational-institutional solutions that can help people to live longer at the place they like most, ensuring a high quality of life, autonomy and security (Steg et al., 2006). AAL solutions are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people and provide assistive propositions for maintaining an independent lifestyle (De Ruyter & Pelgrim, 2007). Within this complex and continuously evolving framework, it is very challenging to technologically meet all users’ needs and requirements regarding accessibility and usability along the development process. Accessibility is a prerequisite for basic use of products by as many users as possible, in particular elderly persons and persons with sensory, physical or cognitive disabilities. Usability denotes the ease with which these products or services can be used to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use (Wegge & Zimmermann, 2007). These aspects should be taken into account during the product design ideally from early stages, following a more interactive and iterative design-development-testing procedure. The major problem lies in the global cost of the design and development process, which can be critically increased, since AmI