Healthy Aging Exhibit Nears Completion

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Healthy Aging Exhibit

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Weekly meeting activities

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Stress Management Area in Progress

Masters students doing Second Life final projects and grad assistants have been hard at work developing the exhibits for the soon-to-be-launched Healthy Aging exhibit. This exhibit expands the previous Garden of Healthy Aging considerably and has its own separate site to accommodate the larger scale and number of prims.  It will be accessible from the OT Center at Eduisland 2 via landmark.

Zsuzsa will present the Healthy Aging project at the annual Gerontological Society of America meeting. The conference theme this year is Creative Approaches to Healthy Aging.

New issue, 3D Virtual Worlds for Health and Healthcare, of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, online now

The program evaluation of the Occupational Therapy Center at Jefferson in Second Life has just been published in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. Occupational therapy  educator Rashid Kashani (from University of Alberta in Canada) wrote a “think piece” for the same issue that suggests occupational therapists may be especially well equipped for  program development roles in virtual worlds.  There are many other interesting articles related to 3D virtual worlds for health and healthcare, check it out!

Virtual World, Real Learning: Graduate Students discuss Second Life® project

Open House and Graduate Student Presentations

On June 11 we held an Open House Event to celebrate the newly renovated Adaptation Home. At the six hour event Sweeney, Lynnze, and Shay all added their own special spin to the talk about graduate student contributions to the exhibits.

grad student presentation

grad student presentation

In addition to the adaptation home, we have moved the Stroke Challenge exhibit formerly at HealthInfo Island to the area in back of Project Theater. A copy of the Caregiver Strategies holodeck is next to the Stroke Challenge.

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A total of 34 visitors attended the presentations and/or explored the exhibits.

Next: Expansion of the Garden of Healthy Aging.

Renovated Adaptation Home Nears Completion

Discussing renovations to the adapted home

Discussing renovations to the adapted home

Last night we met with Kathee Gibbs (top photo, far left) to discuss final renovations to the Adapted Home. We have a duplicate of the home at our sandbox where we experiment. Kathee made some suggestions that Sweeney (“Holodeck queen,” pink jacket) will put in place and was very pleased overall with the displays. Later on, Plato Pizzicatto (our collaborator from Penn State Abington, white shirt) stopped by. Carly Charlesworth also stopped by unexpectedly (and serendipitously). Carly provided insights and suggestions from her experiences of severe sciatica when she used a wheelchair and crutches.

The renovation gives visitors the option to click on the light switch for each room (labeled holo-emitter, above) and choose Mobility, Cognitive, or Low Vision scenes.  Additional information can be accessed by clicking the icon board in each room (labeled more info, above). Grad student Lynnze Inglewood has done the scripting for the boards. We will also launch a Wiki that provides web links and information about home adaptations, universal design, and healthy aging (which we will renovate next with particular attention to psychosocial issues in aging). We expect to announce an Open House upon completion of renovations next week or early the following week.

Graduate Students Present on Second Life® to Japanese Visitors

SL presentation

SL presentation

On Monday, March 11, first year graduate students Shanna Corbin, Lindsay Allan, and Shyvonne Gallagher provided a lively presentation about the Jefferson OT Center in Second Life®.  In attendance were 5 students from Kitasato University in Sagamihara, Japan, and about 70 students and faculty in health professions at JCHP.

The audience response was interesting, too. After Shanna explained the benefits of SL for some persons who have severe physical disabilities, one of the JCHP physical therapy students stated his opinion that SL discouraged people from being involved in real life. Another point raised was that people might accomplish a lot in SL, at the expense of real life. It didn’t seem to dawn on  the student who asked the question, that accomplishments in SL can be “real.”  The OT student presenters did a great job fielding questions, and people seemed to enjoy the presentation and find it interesting.

Thought-Provoking Slideshare

This slideshare from Judy O’Connell is well worth the view, if you are an educator who wants to be part of real learning and teaching in the 21st Century and can be open to the pardigm shift required.

Adventures in Research and Teaching in Second Life®

This was the title of my recent presentation at a pre-conference for the Professional and Scholarly Division of the Association of American Publishers. Held on February 4 in Washington, DC, and organized by Jack Farrell , I joined co-presenters Carol Perryman (SL: Carolina Keats) of HealthInfo Island and Kristin French of the Nature Publishing group for a lively discussion around the topic “Mashup at the Library:  Managing Colliding User Needs, Technologies, and the Ability to Deliver.” Our one-hour presentation was well received, and several participants commented that it was a very interesting mix of of academic, library/consumer health, and business perspectives. Participants (who included personnel  from the National Library of Medicine) asked many thought-provoking questions, covering areas such as:

  • The learning curve in SL and the need to orient and train staff
  • Use of and challenges with available methods for getting accurate statistics on numbers of visitors
  • Data gathering methods in research on SL and confounding factors

OT Grad Students Do Final MS Projects in SL

alana_wrenAlana Scorbal (Therese, left) and Wrenna Beerbaum (Suzanne, right), completed their final Masters in Occupational Therapy projects on December 7, 2008 at the Department’s Final Project Presentations. Alana’s focused on the program evaluation of The OT Center at Jefferson in Second Life, and Sue’s consisted of development and evaluation of an exhibit on Healthy Aging and Neuroplasticity. Congrats to both on a fantastic job! See report of evaluation.

Occupational Therapy in virtual worlds featured in new journal article

Check out the latest from International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. My colleague Maged Kamel Boulos, with whom I worked on the Sexual Health Sim, is lead author on the newly released paper,Web 3D for Public, Environmental and Occupational Health: Early Examples from Second Life®. I was pleased to contribute a section in the paper about how occupational therapy exhibits in virtual worlds can provide education about health and environmental adaptation,  helping people to visualize the ways in which their home environments can be improved and gaining greater awareness of ways to minimize risks for work-related injury.  Of course, the role of occupational therapy is much more than just this, and we look forward to expanding our exhibits in the future. In particular, we  are planning an expansion of our “garden of healthy aging”–stay tuned!