Abstract:

Studies on topics such as active ageing or health and well-being show that older people want to remain healthy and active as they age. Nowadays, new technologies guarantee older people longer and healthier lives, but do not really facilitate more social aspects of their lives. In a world where entertainment, social relationships, public and private activities are based on the use of technology, older people lacking technological knowledge risk social isolation. They will find it progressively more difficult to use all the public and private e-services necessary to maintain an active and socially integrated life.

So, the goal of our research is to help older people to cope with their technological illiteracy. In this paper we present our work on an innovative learning environment (LE) specifically tailored for older adults, easily accessible without any previous knowledge of technology, and capable of delivering educational material on technology and, particularly, on e-services.

We developed a prototype of LE in Augmented Reality (AR), an emerging technology allowing the creation of augmented environments, in which computer-generated digital content is seamlessly combined and overlapped into our perceptions of the real world. Augmented environments delivered through Head-Mounted Displays, as in our case, are immersive, fully 3-D, and interactive in real-time. In addition, especially when these environments are created for educational purposes, they seem to facilitate the learning of visual contents, encourage the process of "learning-by-doing", increase the user’s involvement and enjoyment in the process of learning and connect the user’s personal experience to the content to be learned. And finally, and more in general, these environments are usually easy to use.

The prototype of the LE we developed shows all the above features, even though we had to introduce some limitations in some features and functionalities of the LE, in order to account for some psycho-physical impairments that are common in older adults. In addition, our prototype can reshape itself in order to adapt to the real environment the user is in, so as to augment the real world with holographic content. Moreover, in order to favor the ease of use of the LE, the prototype contains a virtual assistant which guides and helps the user throughout the augmented experience and introduces the educational material that will be presented in the different learning modules.

In future works, we plan to increase the number of learning modules; we also plan to improve the virtual assistant and make it more capable of interacting with the user, since we believe that a more interactive assistant could greatly increase the quality of the learning experience. Finally, given that our LE is a tool developed for helping older adults to cope with their technological illiteracy, we intend to use the LE with groups of older adults to explore the impact AR has on them, so to understand whether our LE could possibly become for older adults an effective and easier alternative to the already available learning environments delivered with different technologies.

Keywords:

Augmented learning, augmented reality, e-learning, learning for older adults.