AMIGA - An Interactive Musical Environment for Gerontechnology

Benefits provided by music in humans have been reinforced through several studies, mainly by active participation in musical therapy sessons, with surprising results in physical and psychological rehabilitation. However, all the previous implemented approaches require specialized hardware to function and complex configurations to set-up. We define a computational system focused on the elderly to allow musical expressiveness through motion, solely using the resources available in an ordinary home computer. To evaluate our approach, we developed a prototype and piloted acceptance tests on several senior citizens, with an average age of eighty-three. Our experiments showed high levels of interest from the senior citizens, denoting positive capabilities of well-being and life quality enrichment. The performed experiments have also shown that an ordinary computer is capable of performing the proposed methodology, without any restriction.