Author(s)

Keizo Sato, Kaoru Kuroki, Syuko Saiki, Ryoichi Nagatomi

Department of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan.
Department of Physical Therapy, Faculty of health Sciences, Tohoku Fukushi University, Sendai, Japan.

Purpose: Elderly persons may benefit from regular physical exercise to maintain or improve their quality of life and health status. Low adherence to physical exercise, however, is often a problem. A new type of videogames, “exergames”, involving physical motion of the players has recently been developed and is expected to keep elderly people active. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of a newly developed exergame on health benefits such as muscle strength and body balance of elderly people. Methods: We invited 24 healthy community-dwelling elderly persons aged 71.46 ± 4.8 years old (8 men and 16 women) volunteered for this study. We developed a new exergame program for using Kinect^TM (Microsoft Co., Ltd. Redmond, WA) motion sensor. A single exergame session lasted approximately 30 minutes including warm-up and cool-down sessions. The participants are asked to play the exergame 2 - 3 times per week for 2.5 months at our institute. Maximal isometric muscular strength of major muscles of lower extremities and functional balance were examined before and after the exergame intervention. Result: All participants completed 24 sessions of the exergame program. There were significant improvements in maximal isometric muscular strength of hip joint flexion, and knee joint extension and flexion, of ankle joint dorsiflexion. Also MFC, a significant difference was noted between Pre and Post values. However, there was no statistically significant improvement in the functional balance test. Conclusion: Exergame developed in this study was found to be effective in improving muscular strength of lower extremities.

Exergame; Kinect; Elderly; Muscle Strength; Minimum Foot Clearance

Sato, K. , Kuroki, K. , Saiki, S. and Nagatomi, R. (2014) The effects of exercise intervention using Kinect^TM on healthy elderly individuals: A quasi-experimental study. Open Journal of Therapy and Rehabilitation, 2, 38-44. doi: 10.4236/ojtr.2014.21008.