Projects

Project Description: Prior work suggests that practicing functional everyday activities can enhance real-world performance, an approach often described as ecologically valid practice. However, implementing realistic practice in everyday environments is often difficult and may pose safety risks, particularly for individuals with dementia who may be vulnerable to injury. Virtual reality (VR) has been proposed as a promising approach to address this challenge by enabling safe, repeatable simulations of everyday activities. Despite this promise, little research has examined how VR environments should represent the meaningful daily lives of people with dementia or how interaction design should be optimized for this population. To address these gaps, this project aims to: (1) understand how meaningful everyday activities of people with dementia should be represented in VR, (2) investigate how VR interactions can be optimized to support usability, and (3) evaluate whether the routine use of VR programs designed around these principles can improve functional performance among people with dementia. 

Publication:

• E. Babb, M. Jasim, C. D. Lee, and H.-T. Jung. "Defining Reality in Dementia VR: Stakeholder Perspectives on Ecological Validity for Functional Activity Training." In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI'26), 2026.

Project Description:

• TBA

Publication:

• TBA