Handsy

Making our seniors more active through an augmented reality game

→ Try it here

What is Handsy

A simple in-browser game designed to get seniors moving and keeping healthy!

What motivated you to build Handsy?

During COVID circuit breaker, people were urged to stay home, and many senior centers were closed. We want seniors to age healthy and keep active even when they’re home.

You identitied user research as the most challenging part of the process. Why?

Although we managed to speak with the staff at the senior care, the best way to really understand seniors and their behaviour is to spend time with them and observe how they interact with our game. The physical visit also could be challenging to arrange and we only had limited time to interview a few seniors. The typical way of sending out surveys and conducting user interviews through zoom or video call are not ideal in our case.

Fun facts!

One interesting finding:

It’s not easy to get seniors to understand the augmented reality concept than we thought. They tend to reach their hands towards the screen to grab the items.

One thing you’re most proud of accomplishing:

The seniors really enjoyed the same, some of them even asked to play it next time!

One thing you’d have done differently:

To let more users try out our game. The user tests only happened on the last week of hackathon due to schedule conflicts and arranging time with the senior care centers could be challenging.

Shout Outs:

Shout out to the staff at PCF Sparkle Care and New Horizon Centre for all your time in answering our questions and letting us try the game with the seniors!

Future steps?

We see potential future usecases where the hand tracking technology we use can possibly be extended to finger and body tracking, this could potentially help even people who have mobility problems. Exercises in the form of games could help could be designed for them to get back to normal life.

For more info: https://www.open.gov.sg/hackathon/2021/handsy