This case study describes the creation of a headmounted display virtual reality exergame program for promoting physical exercise for people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), namely people with earlystage dementia. We engaged in an iterative participatory design process with kinesiologists, recreational therapists, and people with MCI prior to pilot-testing a prototype program with three persons with MCI. The test participants engaged in the exergame, were able to do the exercises, and their feedback was very positive. Engaging with professionals and people with dementia throughout the design process was very beneficial to creating a usable and engaging design as well as identifying areas that could be further improved. In conclusion, the approach illustrated through this case study resulted a new way for older adults with MCI to engage in physical activities that is fun and tailored to their abilities. The next phase in our research is to evaluate the exergame against comparable human-guided movements.

Exercise is an important factor for people living with dementia as it improves physical fitness and quality of life; however, it can be challenging for them to engage in exercise. This research created two virtual reality environments using Oculus Rift head-mounted display and Oculus touch controllers, with the goal of increasing the accessibility to exercise for people living with dementia. A three-week evaluation was conducted with six persons living with dementia to compare the virtual programs with human/therapist-guided exercise. The results showed that both virtual exercise programs were comparable to the therapist-guided exercise in terms of subjective enjoyment, comfort, and difficulty level of the activities. All the participants completed all the tasks designed for them in each day and five wanted to continue using virtual reality exercises. This research demonstrates promising potential of virtual reality exergames for people living with dementia. Future studies are needed to expand the available tasks, increase the available environments, and to examine clinical impact.

No abstract

No abstract

Psychovisual rate-distortion optimization (Psy-RD) has been used in the industrial video coding practice as a tool to improve perceptual video quality. It has earned significant popularity through the wide spread of the open source x264 video encoders, where the Psy-RD option is employed by default. Nevertheless, little work has been dedicated to validate the impact of Psy-RD optimization on perceptual quality, so as to provide meaningful guidance on the practical usage and future development of the idea. In this work, we build a database that contains Psy-RD encoded video sequences at different strength and bitrates. A subjective user study is then conducted to evaluate and compare the quality of the Psy-RD encoded videos. We observe that there is considerable agreement between subjects' opinions on the test video sequences. Unfortunately, the impact of Psy-RD optimization on video quality does not appear to be encouraging. Somewhat surprisingly, the perceptual quality gain of Psy-RD ON versus Psy-RD OFF cases is negative on average. Our results suggest that Psy-RD optimization should be used with caution. Further investigations show that most state-of-the-art full-reference objective quality models correlate well with the subjective experiment results overall. But in terms of the paired comparison between Psy-RD ON and OFF cases, the false alarm rates are moderately high.