Effect of Gamification of Exercise Therapy on Elderly’s Anxiety Emotion

Abstract

The anxiety of the elderly has been one of the most common psychological disorders, which will lead to increased mortality and economic loss. Exercise therapy has been shown to alleviate anxiety in the elderly. This study aims to compare the impact of simple exercise therapy and gamified exercise therapy on the elderly’s anxiety. For the elderly, this research developed a prototype system which allows players to control the video game Tetris by hitting the punch bag to gamify the process of exercise. The study recruited 14 subjects with an average age of 66 years (60–75). The participants were divided into a control group with only simply punching and an experimental group with gamification intervention. This study used The State Trait Anxiety Scale and the Rating of Perceived Exertion. The game score changes in the experimental group were recorded. The results show that compared with simple exercise therapy, gamified exercise therapy has a more significant mitigation effect on the state anxiety of the elderly. The degree of exercise fatigue of both groups is consistent. It is shown that such simple gamification is not a big challenge for the cognitive ability of the elderly, and most of the participants felt satisfied with the procedure and expressed initiatives to play the game. This method might be a promising intervention for relieving the elderly’s anxiety. In the future work, it is necessary to conduct long-term experiments to verify the effect of gamification of exercise therapy on the trait anxiety of the elderly.