It is no secret that connecting to nature via the natural landscape benefits the mind, spirit and body. But what if you can’t get up and into nature yourself; what if you’re bound to the bed with strict medical schedules? What if there is simply no one to take you there? This project’s key objective is to bring accessibility to the elements of nature’s healing landscape into the care-home environment for shared experiences. Special attention will be paid to urban care-homes and severely bed bound patients.
The National Library of Medicine reported a 34-41% prevalence of depression amongst older people living in nursing homes. This makes nursing homes in the UK some of the most highly concentrated facilities for depression.
As the growing epidemic of depression and anxiety in young adults worsens - where can we expect these figures to land over the next 50 years?
It is well documented that immersion into the natural landscape benefits the mind, spirit and body. The forest landscape in particular is a high density stimulant of all of our senses: Vision (scenery), Olfaction (wood, grass, leaves and flowers), Auditory (streams, rustling leaves, wind, creaking wood) and tactile (leaves, bark, loam).
This isn’t the first time nature has been invited into a space to help vulnerable, suffering and isolated people within the nursing home environment. It's not even the first time virtual reality has been used to deploy the concept of nature therapy.
The differentiator of this project is to implement natural elements into a space for shared mixed reality experiences. MDPI’s article, “Neuroscience Application for the Analysis of Cultural Ecosystem Services Related to Stress Relief in Forest” employs 360 video and sound recordings via a HTC Vive HMD (head mounted display) to immerse the users and prospect patients. While this is an effective way of transporting the user into another space, here we are looking at bringing nature into the space to create a shared mixed reality experience, providing urban care-home common space with nature connotations. The aim is for this to cultivate a general connectedness between urban indoors and the deep natural landscape (that is to say raw, rural nature without mechanical noise pollution).
While HMDs provide an excellent portal to total disconnect from the users surroundings, they are not a practical solution here.
We want to deploy a multisensory mixed reality experience. The melding of the virtual and physical worlds via subtle sound (small scale speaker arrays), olfaction (scent dispensers, organic materials) and visual cues (video, pictures, imagination) is able to trigger powerful psychological reactions. By incorporating such technology into urban care home common space, preliminary research suggests enhanced mental and potentially physical well being.
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