Scoping Review on the Interactive Digital Tools Used for the Physical and Cognitive Stimulation of Healthy Older Adults

Abstract

As more of our lives are spent using electronic devices, it comes as a natural deduction that those digital tools could be used to maintain people’s health. Gamified exercise or exergames are indeed promising means to motivate the population to get physically active and even cognitively active if paired with the appropriate games. Considering the global concern of an aging population which could benefit from both physical and cognitive stimulation, these tools appear to be an encouraging solution to keep the population healthier over time. This scoping review reports on the digital tools used in publications between January 2015 and December 2023 regarding the physical and cognitive stimulation of healthy elderly people. The search was conducted in PubMed, Web of Science, and ScienceDirect databases. Of the 1579 publications retrieved, a total of 68 publications were analyzed in this review. A wide variety of digital tools were used in the corpus for the combined physical and cognitive stimulation of the elderly. These tools can be categorized into six types of hardware: pressure plates, optical motion capture, inertial motion capture, virtual reality, ergometers, and driving simulators. The apparition of publications using virtual reality and an increase in publications using inertial motion capture in 2020 could be an indicator that digital tools used for cognitive and physical stimulation of the elderly are evolving. Another finding is the wide variety in evaluation tools used to monitor the outcomes of each protocol. A standardization of the testing process might be needed in order to improve comparisons between experiments.