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People living in long-term care facilities due to physical or mental impairments have few opportunities for self-determined activity. Virtual reality (VR) technologies offer a potential to expand individual experience through immersive presence in artificial environments, to activate mentally and to promote autonomy through the impact of self-efficacy. The overall goal of the Austrian project VR4Care was to research design basics for the development of a motivating, gender-sensitive, personalized and cost-effective VR technology to increase the activation and quality of life primarily of residents in inpatient long-term care. In the further development of VR for senior citizens, gender-specific differences were taken into account, such as gender-specific requirements for user interfaces, gender-specific preferences in interests with regard to content and different expectations of support when using the VR-based system.

Affective states play a prominent role in the context of human activation and motivation. Immersive VR-based presence provides opportunities to activate elderly people in the context of preferred leisure activities (Häussl et al., 2021) or to apply mindfulness interventions for their cognitive reserve (Paletta et al., 2021). The appropriate design of positively activating content is pivotal for appropriate changes in users’ affective states. The presented study provided insight into the potential of non-invasive VR-based eye tracking for automated estimation of affective state induced by video content, in an explorative pilot study with seven elderly persons living in a nursing home. The results indicate the feasibility of estimating mood change from typical eye movement features, such as, fixation duration and pupil diameter, as a promising future research topic.