No abstract

This article presents an analysis of age differences in virtual reality (VR) use. One hundred forty-eight users, grouped by age and balanced by gender, answered questionnaires about their driving, educational, and medical histories, as well as their experience with computers. Participants then completed a driving assessment in a low-cost, PC-based virtual environment known as DriVR. Dependent measures included both automatic and observer recorded quantitative measures of driving performance, as well as participant reported qualitative measures of difficulty, comfort, visual clarity, delay, and simulator sickness. There were few age-related differences in quantitative measures, whereas qualitative differences between middle-aged and elderly participants were seldom found. These results indicated that use of VR with the elderly is quite feasible. In a contradiction of previously reported results, symptoms of simulator sickness increased with age.

This article presents the results of two studies of a new driving simulator called "DriVR." The first, normative study examined the performance of an uninjured driving population on the simulator. The driving ability of 148 participants in eight age categories was assessed using DriVR. The second, discriminative validity study examined DriVR's ability to discriminate between the performance of head-injured and uninjured adults. We administered the DriVR assessment to 17 head-injured adults. The performance of this group was compared to that of a subgroup of uninjured participants that matched the brain-injured participants in age, gender, and years of education. In general, DriVR's measures showed age-related changes in participant performance and were able to discriminate between head-injured and uninjured participants. These results suggested that age norms would be useful for analyzing the performance of head-injured clients who are being assessed with DriVR. It should be noted, however, that these studies did not examine DriVR's ability to predict performance in real, on-the-road tests.

The results of this study suggest that the use ofsimulated patients in fi1cilitating group process and content was viewed by occupational and physical therapy students to be more [aoorable than the useof videotapes. AbstractSeventy-three occupational and physical therapy students participated in two seminars. In oneseminar, students interacted directly with a simulat-

We examined the use of ISDN video-phones by health professionals and two types of home care clients: those receiving palliative care and those receiving antenatal care. In the palliative care group, there were four female clients and 15 health professionals; these clients on average had the video-phones at home for six weeks and made 12.5 calls per week. The antenatal care group consisted of six female clients and eight female registered nurses; these clients on average also had the video-phones at home for six weeks and made 12.5 calls per week. Exit interviews were conducted with three clients and eight staff in the palliative care group, and with six clients and three staff in the antenatal care group. Palliative care clients and their families commented that the visual feature of the phone enhanced the care that they received. In the antenatal group, the video-phone was used mainly for booking appointments and arranging home visits. In general, the technology was well received by clients and care providers.