When Japanese elderly people play a Finnish physical exercise game: a usability study

In this paper, we report the findings from the usability testing of the Finnish Skiing Game with 24 Japanese elderly participants at the Sendai City Health Promotion Center in Japan. The main objective of the study is to investigate the participants' feedback towards the usability of the Skiing Game, which was originally designed and developed for elderly Finnish people. We also investigated the Japanese elderly participants' game experiences during and after the gameplay. The findings show that the Skiing Game was an easy and user-friendly game for the elderly participants. Their gameplay experiences during and after the game session were fairly positive. Most of the participants were interested in the gameplay, and they agreed that digital games could be an effective way of exercising. In this study, we observed that the Finnish Skiing Game is a suitable game for the elderly Japanese people because of its simple interface, easy game action, and friendly game context. In this paper, we provide the usability guidelines and recommendations that we learned from this study.