Exploring the use of technology and virtual worlds to help the elderly

Abstract

The objective of this report is to give the reader a detailed description of the author’s work and learning experience during completion of the Final Year Project at School of Computer Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. For this project, a virtual environment built by people at the NTU Emerging Research Lab using Unity, was used as a 3D world housing several mini-games that challenge an elderly person’s cognitive, mathematical and analytical skills. The virtual world serves as an integrated environment providing social interaction, entertainment and improvement of mental ability for the elderly.

This project draws inspiration from the fact that the elderly people have unintentionally been isolated from the daily life due to their lack of interest in technology and use of technologically supreme products of the current age. This project aims to use challenging games within the virtual world to encourage the elderly from adopting technology as a part of daily life.

The project implementation focuses on utilization of the virtual world Co-Space built on Unity 3D, a front-runner in open-source 3D game development software while simultaneously using Text-to-Speech technology to provide an alternative means of feedback to the audibly impaired.

An ‘Amazing Quest’ has been developed to encourage users to explore the virtual environment while simultaneously interacting with other users through chat and completing mini-games. The entire project has been developed for the web using Unity 3D and programming languages JavaScript and C#.