Mobile walking game and group-walking program to enhance going out for older adults

Abstract

Japan is aging rapidly, so "tojikomori" has become an important issue. In the field of gerontology, "tojikomori" means shutting oneself in a room or house. Tojikomori is caused not only by physical factors but also by social and psychological ones. Once an elderly person becomes tojikomori, it takes a lot of time and energy to recover. It is important to take primary preventive measures, especially for currently active older adults because a little help has a great benefit. A previous study identified two key factors of tojikomori in an urban area: no exercise habits and no participation in community activities. Therefore, we developed a walking game to enhance physically healthy behavior and motivate the elderly to explore a city and lead to the discovery of favorite spots they want to visit again. In addition, we designed a group-walking program utilizing the walking game aimed for face-to-face communication with other community-dwelling elderly people. Our results show that our approach was well received, enjoyable, and effective for older adults in a real-world situation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.