Virtual fitness trail: A complete program for elderlies to perform physical activity at home

This paper presents a Virtual Reality (VR) exergame, Virtual Fitness Trail (VFT), designed to encourage the elderly to regularly exercise in an engaging and safe way staying at home. VFT provides a highly immersive physical activity experiences in first-person perspective and it has been developed to run on Oculus Quest head mounted display. The exergame proposes four activities involving the main muscles of the legs and arms, as well as stabilizing balance and reflexes: monkey bar, side raises, basketball shot and slalom between beams. Each activity has four difficulty level and has been designed to minimize the perception of self-motion so as to reduce the cybersickness arise. The user’s performances are saved in.json file and it can be shared, via email, with the caregiver at the end of the exergame session. The application is a prototype and needs to be tested and validated before proposing it for autonomous physical activity at home.