Systematic review highlights VR's benefits for rehabilitation and mental health in older adults, indicating a need for user-friendly design.
Virtual reality (VR) shows great potential as an integrated system to meet the complex demands of older adults from healthcare to psychological health, entertainment and lifelong learning. This paper surveys relevant researches on VR applications for older adults. The effectiveness of VR technology in these applications has been proved in many experiments: improving physical rehabilitation (the Parkinson patients fell 30% less risk), mental health (lowing the social isolation and depression of the elderly), and even the training of cognition. Compared with traditional methods, VR creates an immersive experience and greater freedom of choice. However, the existing problems of VR technology cannot be ignored, such as technology popularization problems restricting the popularity, economic problems and ethical problems. The paper discusses the increasing commercial value of VR technology for older users and calls for more researches on older-friendly design based on user requirements and long-term effectiveness experiments.
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He et al. (2025) studied this question.