From a Research Centre to a Mall: Bringing Virtual Reality and Digital Playing to a Living Lab for Community Dwelling Older Adults.

Playing has important psychosocial and emotional benefits for older adults. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the interest in incorporating digital interactions and virtual reality (VR) technologies into healthcare strategies that target older adults. In this phenomenological study, we share our experience of bringing playful and creative gaming and VR technologies to community-dwelling older adults. With funding from Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC), we created a storefront engAGE living lab (ELL) in a shopping mall in a suburb of Montreal (Quebec, Canada) with a high concentration of older population. In this study we tried to repeat a previous study “finding better games for older adults” that was conducted in a university-based research centre for healthy ageing (PERFORM Centre, Concordia University). In this study, based on experience of three research assistants who ran the study between July-Dec 2022, we evaluated strength, weakness, opportunity, and threats (SWOT) of conducting this research in ELL. We found that passive recruitment of older adults into such studies was challenging. To establish trust and long-term relationships between researchers and participants was an important factor in retaining participants in the study, but it created transactional situations where some participants’ motivations were not related to tested technologies, but to socializing with researchers. This work provides insights into the challenges and opportunities of conducting research in public settings.