Immersive Technologies and Elderly Users: Current use, Limitations and Future Perspectives

TL;DR

This paper reviews how immersive XR technologies are currently used by elderly users, highlighting challenges, limitations, and future directions for developing accessible and engaging applications tailored to their physical and mental needs.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive literature review of elderly users' characteristics, existing XR applications, and design paradigms to guide future development of accessible XR solutions for seniors.

Findings

Elderly users face specific physical and mental challenges with XR applications.

Current XR applications for elders vary in design and effectiveness.

Guidelines for developing accessible XR applications for seniors are discussed.

Abstract

The increase of the percentage of elderly population in modern societies dictates the use of emerging technologies as a means of supporting elder members of the society. Within this scope, Extended Reality (XR) technologies pose as a promising technology for improving the daily lives of the elderly population. This paper presents a literature review that describes the most common characteristics of the physical and mental state of the elderly, allowing readers, and specifically XR developers, to understand the main difficulties faced by elderly users of extended reality applications so they can develop accessible, user friendly and engaging applications for the target audience. Furthermore, a review of existing extended reality applications that target the elder population is presented, allowing readers to get acquainted with existing design paradigms that can inspire future developments.