Senior Designers: Empowering Seniors to Design Enjoyable Falls Rehabilitation Tools Stephen Uzor Glasgow Caledonian University Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, UK stephen.uzor@gcu.ac.uk Lynne Baillie Glasgow Caledonian University Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, UK l.baillie@gcu.ac.uk Dawn A. Skelton Glasgow Caledonian University Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, UK d.skelton@gcu.ac.uk ABSTRACT Studies have shown that functional strength and balance exercises can reduce the risk of falling in older people if they are done on a regular basis. However, the repetitive nature of these exercises; as well as the use of instructional booklets and videos for rehabilitation may discourage seniors to exercise in the home, thereby rendering such an intervention ineffective. Our work proposed that the use of multimodal games – co-designed with seniors – could be a way of making falls rehabilitation more enjoyable; thereby improving adherence to home exercise programmes. In this paper, we first explain the process by which we identified barriers to the users’ effective interaction with current home rehabilitation tools. We then go on to describe how we actively involved seniors in the initial design, and improvement of useful, enjoyable games for falls rehabilitation. Our findings suggest that seniors are an integral part of the design process and should be directly involved from the concept stages of the design of tools for their rehabilitation. Author Keywords Games; User-centered; Design; Falls; Rehabilitation. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.2 [Information Interfaces And Presentation]: User Interfaces - Interaction styles; INTRODUCTION Just over a quarter of adults over the age of 65 (and half of all adults aged 80+) fall at least once a year [16, 25]. Some falls result in fractures, which can lead to disability, loss of independence and fear of falling. The cost of fractures can be very high in most countries (estimated at $10 billion [11] in the United States and £1.8 billion in the UK). In recent years, there has been a push towards the implemen tation of more useful fall prevention strategies, to reduce the burden of falls on healthcare practices and promote independent living. One of the most important strategies involves rehabilitation – using strength and balance exercises – which has been shown to improve muscle strength, balance and mobility in fallers [23]. Consequently, these specially tailored exercises have been utilized in a wide variety of settings to help older adults at risk of falling to return to functional capacity and an independent life. However, there is a problem with the uptake and adherence to home exercise programmes [19]. Previous studies have focused on studying adherence rates only; with some studies investigating compliance within supervised group therapy classes. Relatively little work has investigated the reasons as to why adherence rates are so low when it comes to unsupervised rehabilitation in the home. There is evidence to suggest that due to the repetitive nature of rehabilitation exercises (which is necessary to improve muscle strength and balance), some patients find the routine monotonous and boring. In recent times, video games have proved a successful intervention to making rehabilitation more enjoyable for patients with a wide variety of ailments. The use of commercially available games such as Wii-Fit has become a staple of encouraging physical activity in older adults – mostly in the clinical setting. However, rehabilitation often involves specifically tailored exercises which promote the recovery of muscle groups necessary for improved strength, balance and mobility. Therefore, there is a need to go one step further in the design of video games, in order to make them useful for rehabilitation purposes. The use and adaptation of games to facilitate seniors’ rehabilitation however has seen them play mainly a passive role in the design process; as they are generally asked to provide feedback on elements of the game(s), which the designer (usually a young person) takes into account when improving these tools. Our long term goal is to improve adherence to home exercise for falls rehabilitation through the use of more interactive multimodal activities. In order to successfully pursue this goal, it was crucial that we first explored the reasons why older adults may not adhere to exercise programmes using current falls rehabilitation tools (instructional booklets and videos). By doing this, we hoped to identify some of the requirements for the improvement of home exercise tools. Secondly, we believed that it was necessary to collaboratively design the tools with Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CHI’12, May 5–10, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1015-4/12/05...$10.00. Session: Participatory Design with Older People CHI 2012, May 5–10, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA 1179