Experiencing the body as play: Cultivating older adults’ exergame experiences using embodied metaphors and multimodal feedback

Abstract

Physical activity (PA) is promising in increasing active life for older adults, but its repetitive and fatigue-inducing nature greatly harms older adults’ motivation to participate. Recently, there has been a growing interest in applying exergames to improve older adults’ PA adherence and engagement. To better support body-based interactions, embodied metaphors and multimodal feedback are suggested to ensure effective and meaningful mapping between elderly players’ input actions and exergame responses, but their effectiveness have not been fully investigated. After developing a list of embodied and ontological metaphors based a series of user-centered approaches, two experiments were conducted to investigate how embodied metaphors and multimodal feedback impact older adults'’ playing experience of PA exergames, among fifty-nine and twenty-five older adults, respectively. Regarding the embodied metaphor design, the results indicated that a higher embodiment level significantly and positively influenced the participants’ acceptance behavior in terms of their attitudes toward the exergame, and a higher information richness level demonstrated significantly positive effects on familiarity perception and all aspects of acceptance behavior. For the multimodal feedback design, the results indicated that 3D visual feedback better facilitated the participants’ sense of embodiment and immersion, as well as their acceptance behavior, compared to 2D visual feedback. Furthermore, constant tactile feedback in a continuous-only or continuous-and-augmented way significantly improved the participants’ PA movement performance and sense of embodiment, rather than instant feedback. Accordingly, a list of design guidelines for PA exergame development is proposed, with the possible contributions and limitations of this research addressed.