Product Research with Rendever
Rendever is a small, startup in Boston, MA with the goal of bringing virtual reality to seniors living in residential care communities. Their hope is to “overcome social isolation through the power of virtual reality and shared experiences”
Product Research with Rendever
Executive Summary
The move to a senior living community can make older adults feel isolated and lonely. Even worse, past research has demonstrated that social isolation is as detrimental to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Rendever’s goal is to provide seniors with virtual reality technology that not only allows them to be immediately transported into an immersive experience, but to do it alongside friends and family. The company had numerous examples of positive mental health outcomes on their users anecdotally but wanted to test their product more rigorously and over time to gain a holistic understanding of the potential.
As a research team studying mental health indicators such as stress, loneliness, and depression at The University of California, Santa Barbara, we were uniquely positioned to partner with Rendever to design and carry out a month long study testing the impact that Rendever’s virtual reality technology has on the well being of it’s users. We tested with 50 users, 25 in the experimental condition and 25 in the control condition, and found that those who interacted with the virtual reality experienced higher levels of vitality and lower levels of loneliness.
From this study, our team received a $2 million dollar NIH grant to further test whether virtual reality experiences could better connect seniors and their adult children.
Research Question
Will users who interact with Rendever’s virtual reality (as opposed to watching the same content on television) over 4 weeks, be more likely to feel like they are unified with their community, which in turn should make them more likely to feel more vital and less lonely?
Methodology & Participants
Working in partnership with Maravilla, a senior living community in Santa Barbara, CA, this project was carried out with 50 residents, who were recruited through events at the community, such as resident meetings, community happy hours, and with the help of the staff.
Once residents were recruited, they were randomly assigned to watch the same content either in the virtual reality (experimental group) or the television (control group). They participated once a week for about one hour each week.
All participants were given an initial survey to establish a baseline for variables such as stress, loneliness, depression, and vitality, among others. Sessions were held in a community room of the residential care community once a week and consisted of groups of 3-6 residents interacting with the technology and then answering survey questions about their experience and the same mental health markers from the baseline.
Analysis
All data were analyzed using the R programming language. Because there were two distinct groups (the virtual reality and television), the assumption of independence was violated. For this reason, the data were analyzed using multilevel modeling to account for the clustering. The hypothesis was also mediational, which is ideal with overtime data. Finally, the data were bootstrapped, which means that it was resampled with replacement in order to create a more realistic distribution. Numerous variables that may have interacted with the test variables were controlled for.
Findings & Distribution
Findings were distributed to study participants in the form of short handouts and a brief presentation explaining the results.
Findings were also distributed to Rendever in the form of a white paper and in a deck.