Content via Huffington Post
Elder care is about to become much more empathetic.
Embodied Labs has come up with a new virtual reality program called “We Are Alfred,” which allows young medical students to feel what it’s like to be an elderly individual experiencing audio and visual problems.
“[Medical students] are usually in their early 20s and not experiencing those kinds of challenges yet, so we decided to create something that would give them the experience of what it might be like to go through the aging process,” Carrie Shaw, the program’s creator and master’s student in biomedical visualization told University of Illinois at Chicago, where she studies.
“We Are Alfred” uses a virtual reality headset, headphones and a hand-tracking device to immerse users in live-action story from the perspective of the 74-year-old man named Alfred. The story consists of six, seven-minute scenes that span from a spilling wine to waiting in a doctor’s office all as Alfred, who has audio and visual impairments.
