Virtual Shopping May Be a Better Assessment of Functional Abilities Than Traditional Methods in Older Adults

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Virtual shopping may help assess an older adult's functional capacities better than current assessments.

Researchers from King's College London set up a virtual reality task where adults had to memorize a list of twelve grocery store items, select them from a virtual store, use a self-checkout machine, pay, and order a cup of coffee.

They discovered that these tasks engaged and tested the parts of the brain responsible for controlling instrumental activities of daily living in a way that current assessments don't.

reference: Porffy, et al. (2021). A novel virtual reality assessment of functional cognition (VStore): Validation Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research.