Studies
| Study Title: | Older Adult's Experiences and Perspectives on Games for Rehabilitation |
| Rationale: | The purpose of the study is to better understand how researchers and designers can best involve older adults as partners in the design process of games for rehabilitation |
| Study Description: |
For this study, you will be involved in two teleconference interview sessions with each lasting no more than one hour. These sessions will involve responding to interview questions and participating in a game design exercise. Once scheduled, you’ll also be asked to fill out a short survey with questions such as your age and gender, gaming experience, and health. In the first session, you will be asked to share your experience in using games for rehabilitation. This will take about 30-40 minutes and will be followed by a short introduction to the game design exercise and an online drawing tool we’ll be using. In the second session, the interviewer will work with you on the design exercise to create a quick game prototype using the online drawing tool. By “prototype” we mean a very rough sketch (drawings, sticky notes, acting-out) of the game, just to make the ideas a bit more concrete so we can test out how they might work in practice. This exercise is meant to be a fun interactive activity to get you thinking about game design. There are no right or wrong answer and we are not looking for “good” designs. This prototyping exercise will take 30-45 minutes. After the exercise, the interviewer will invite you to share more of your thoughts on games for rehabilitation, your perspective on designing games, and how you see older adults contributing to the design and development of these games. The video and audio of the sessions will be recorded during the password-protected and encrypted interview sessions. Only the research team: Dr. William C. Miller, Dr. Julie Robillard, Dr. Ed Geisbrecht, and Gordon Tao will have access to these recordings. These recordings, as well as your survey responses, will be password-protected and stored on encrypted hard drives. This study does not involve any hard copies of your information. When you join the teleconference session, you should also log in with a nickname. You may also turn off your camera or mute your microphone at any time. After the research team has conducted all the study interviews, they will analyze them together to develop findings on how older adults link their experiences to their perspectives on designing rehabilitation games. At this point, the research team will email you a one-page summary of how they interpreted your interview session. If you wish, you may give comments and feedback regarding the how accurate or representative the summary is. This process is called “member checking” and is meant to improve the quality of the findings. It is entirely optional on your part whether to respond or not. |
| Recruitment Dates: | 2021-08-07 to 2022-01-31 |
| Who can participate: | Adults over 50 years of age; have experience using videogames for health such as for physiotherapy, occupational therapy, or cognitive therapy; able to speak English; have access to computer with webcam and internet |
| Location of Trial: | The University of British Columbia |
| Trial Investigator: | Dr. William C. Miller |
| Contact Information: | Tao Gordon
gordon.tao@ubc.ca |
| Trial Funding: | Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council |