Interactive Technology for the Elderly in the Hand-Eye Coordination Training

Taiwan has come to an aging society, dementia of the elderly has become a major concern of the community. The symptom causes a significant reduction of the hand-eye coordination and memory abilities. The hand-eye coordination ability involves many nerve systems. The brain perceives things through the eyes and acquires various information through the touches by different parts of the body, and then makes synthetic analysis before giving an executive order. Therefore, using fun interactive games to activate the hand-eye coordination and memory ability can delay the onset of dementia. In this modern technology era, using information technology to improve the training facility and better the approaches has become a trend. In this study, software programs coded in C# and Flash are developed to work on the Bluetooth ball hardware to facilitate the rehabilitation. The basic principle is use the reaction from the Bluetooth ball’s swaying or swinging to drive the movement of the objects on the computer screen, making the supposedly boring rehabilitation much more fun and vivid in the interactive multimedia environment, thus gaining better treatment effect. Also, RFID, Internet and databases can be integrated into this facility to provide patient identification and data storage for references in making rehabilitation training programs.