Motivating elderly to exercise - recreational virtual environment for indoor biking

Abstract

For most nursing home residents, regular physical exercise is a necessity to keep standard motor-function and strength. Meanwhile, many nursing home residents do not pursue this actively. This paper examines if augmenting a conventional chair-based bike exercise, with a suite of four recreational virtual environments, will increase the intrinsic motivation with a group of nursing home residents. After 4-months of availability, results suggest that the augmentation has increased the intrinsic motivation to exercise, by comparing results from before and after, using measurement scales from the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory.