Physical exercise can be extremely beneficial, but it can also induce anxiety for some, especially if they’re suffering from cardiovascular or neurological issues. Research from Tohoku University’s Smart-Aging Research Center suggests that conducting the training virtually can produce the same benefits but without the anxiety.
The researchers tested the use of Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR), which while initially being designed for entertainment, has increasingly garnered the attention of clinicians as it allows users to experience each virtual world through a virtual avatar.
Virtual training
In previous work by the team, they found that moving a virtual body was sufficient to induce various physiological changes in the user. For instance, their heart rate would increase and decrease in accordance with the movements of their avatar, even though they themselves remained stationary. This resulted in clear cognitive and neural benefits that almost mirror those seen after real physical activity.
The researchers followed this up with a study that found that the same benefits were seen in healthy elderly subjects after they had undergone a 20-minute session twice a week over a six-week period.
What’s more, this also seemed to reduce the stress and anxiety participants felt. The volunteers were exposed to a virtual training display from a first-person perspective to give the illusion of ownership over the movements of their avatar, who ran for 30 minutes at 6.4km/h.
Each volunteer had their psychosocial stress response measured before and after the training via salivary alpha-amylase, which is a biomarker that indicates the level of neuroendocrine stress experienced by the individual. The results clearly show a decrease in the psychosocial stress response of each person, as well as lower levels of anxiety after they’d conducted virtual training, with this comparable to drops found after real exercise.
“Psychosocial stress represents the stress experienced in frequent social situations such as social judgment, rejection, and when our performances get evaluated,” the authors conclude. “While a moderate amount of exposure to stress might be beneficial, repeated and increased exposure can be detrimental to our health. This kind of virtual training represents a new frontier, especially in countries like Japan, where high performance demands and an aging population exist.”
