Towards XR communication for visiting elderly at nursing homes

Abstract

Due to the current pandemic, the elderly in care homes are greatly affected by the lack of contact with their families, resulting in various mental conditions (e.g., depression, feelings of loneliness) and deterioration of mental health for dementia patients. In response, residents and family members increasingly resorted to mediated communication to maintain social contact. To facilitate high-quality mediated social contact between residents in nursing homes and remote family members, we developed an Augmented Reality (AR)-based communication tool. The proposed demonstrator improved this situation by providing a working communication tool that enables the elderly to feel being together with their family by means of AR techniques. A complete end-to-end-chain architecture is defined, where the aspects of capture, transmission, and rendering are thoroughly investigated to fit the purpose of the use case. Based on an extensive user study comprising user experience (UX) and quality of service (QoS) measurements, each module is presented with the improvements made and the resulting higher quality AR communication platform.