The Project
The Telecyclette offers a captivating real-time biking adventure for oldest olds, enabling them to venture into the outdoors while being at home or inside assisted living facilities. This immersive experience is made possible through virtual reality, connecting them with an outdoor biking buddy.
Abstract
Elders living in assisted facilities suffer a serious sense of isolation and affective impoverishment, easily falling into a vicious cycle of demotivation and inactivity. Moving from the tenets of Self-Determination Theory, the project aims to stimulate elders’ motivation to well-being by leveraging on the coupling of outdoor motor activity and social/affective relationships.
To this end, we will realize an innovative device, named Telecyclette, enabling elders to remotely ride a real bike in a real environment together with real buddies and in real time: elders will pedal on a stationary bike wearing a virtual reality setup that, thanks to high-speed live video streaming, creates the sense of telepresence onboard a bike actually ridden by a biking buddy.
For that, the buddy’s bikes will be equipped with a 360-deg action cam mounted frontally (elders’ “eyes”), microphones (“ears”) and loudspeaker (“mouth”) to let elders feel as if they were physically biking and chatting together with the buddy on a tandem. Thanks to a tight collaboration between academics, assisted living facilities, families and local communities, we will
1) develop the device;
2) study visuo-motor optimizations to potentiate visual exploration capabilities and improve interactions between elders and biking buddies (augmented gaze);
3) assess impact longitudinally on elders’ health along bio-psycho-social dimensions in real-world conditions at assisted living facilities;
4) stimulate public awareness.
We expect this project to collect objective evidence demonstrating that it is possible to substantially change how non-self-sufficient elders living in assisted living facilities and their families/friends reciprocally dedicate (part of) their time, thus contributing to open elders’ assisted facilities to the outside world.
The Study
We will conduct a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT). For 6 months, elders living in an assisted residence will pedal on an ordinary cyclette (baseline phase, during which a generalized decline of bio-psycho-social health indexes is expected). In the next 6 months, different Telecyclette types will be introduced, replacing the ordinary cyclette (Telecyclette phase, during which health decline may be diversely countered depending on which Telecyclette type is used, figure 1).
Note that the simulation presented in figure 1 is only intended to illustrate possible different effects of the different Telecyclette types. In reality, we expect much milder effects (and possibly not even a trend reversal but only a more moderate decline). In addition to measure longitudinally the expected positive effects on elders’ health, we will gauge how much these effects are due to increased motor activity (an increase of the time spent pedalling, stimulated by a stronger motivation to using the Telecyclette compared to using an ordinary cyclette) and how much to a direct influence of motivation (curiosity-driven, socially-driven, affect-driven motivation).
Vision
We foresee a future where elders living in assisted facilities can make a phone call to a grandson asking for a Telecyclette ride together. Elders might also call a “biking buddy network” to book a Telecyclette ride, not unlike calling for a taxi. Elders are not the only beneficiaries of this project, though. We believe that everyone will feel reassured upon realizing that it is still possible to take a (virtual) bike ride outdoor together with a loved one even after entering an elder’s facility one day.
