TACTILE – A Mixed Reality Solution for Staying Active and Socially Included

Seniors are often affected by a decline in physical and mental abilities, resulting in social isolation, anxiety, and frailty. They often live alone, spatially separated from family members and friends, who cannot visit them regularly. Moreover, seniors often suffer from physical ailments. Thus, they cannot go outside anymore on their own and feel even more isolated or depressed. Various studies show that playing board games and doing physical exercises keep the mind and body trained and thus have the potential to prevent loneliness and diseases. Therefore, we developed TACTILE – a mixed-reality (MR) solution that connects seniors with family members and friends even when apart. The TACTILE system offers two basic functionalities: (i) board games that can be played with a remote partner and, (ii) physical exercises that are done together with a virtual avatar. While using the system, users can also talk to each other when playing games and interact with the virtual avatar that accompanies the physical exercises. Such interaction strengthens the intuitiveness of the system and the social component even more. Three prototype versions were evaluated within three end-user workshops and a final prototype during long-lasting field trials in two test countries: Austria and the Netherlands. This paper describes the status of the TACTILE system, its components, the strong end-user involvement, and the results and findings from the field trials where the final prototype has been tested for an extended period by 64 end-users in their home and life setting.