Senior Designers: Empowering Seniors to Design Enjoyable Falls Rehabilitation Tools

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.