“VoicingElder: Virtual Puppetry assisting the elder’s life review” won the VCUarts Exploratory Research Grant!!!! Ready to be initiated at Grace Place Adult care center, at Richmond, VA, during 2014 spring.
“VoicingElder” is an expressive storytelling platform designed for seniors that combines reminiscence therapy with virtual interactive puppets to facilitate a deeper understanding of self-worth. The virtual puppets take the form of digital avatars with facial recognition feature, to help seniors recall their distant memories, feelings, and hidden emotions in their storytelling. This intersects many fields of study and fosters interdisciplinary collaboration between art, gerontology, occupational therapy, social work, and computer science. VoicingElder enables seniors to give new voice to their own stories, exploring a rich state of mixed reality in their consciousness.
One line synopsis: Development and piloting of an expressive storytelling platform designed for seniors that combines reminiscence therapy with virtual interactive puppets to facilitate a deeper understanding of self-worth.
