VIRTUAL REALITY IN CARE FOR OLDER ADULTS

Older adults gradually lose their physical and psychical abilities, and they have to get accustomed to this fact. This situation causes certain discomfort for these people and question arises how to make their life easier to minimize the discomfort. One of the possible solutions is to provide them with training by means of which they can acquire new skills that may ideally compensate their inabilities to a satisfactory extent. In this paper, we will discuss possibilities how to employ new information technologies allowing to simulate the virtual interaction of the person in various environments. The use of these technologies also allows personalization, i.e., taking into account the abilities of individual users that suffer from a particular handicap. Moreover, these technologies make possible to train people for new situations in new environments in advance, before they occur there physically, for instance, to train them for operating new devices in the household, etc. The goal of this paper is to attract the attention of people who work in institutions where care for older adults is provided to new methods that in principle can increase the comfort of older adults together with allowing caregivers to increase quality and efficiency of their work. The technology cannot replace human caregivers, but it should provide them with new possibilities in the process when older adults are treated.