Welcome to the doctoral defense interview series
of the Department of Future Technologies.
Here is our new candidate Aung Pyae.
May you introduce yourself and the
main topic of your thesis?
All right, my name is Aung Pyae,
I'm a doctoral candidate from the University of Turku,
Department of Future Technologies.
So, recently I have defended my PhD thesis
in the area of digital games for elderly
people.
So, my PhD topic was
using digital games to promote the
elderly people's quality of life
in terms of their physical well-being and
also their active aging.
So, I focus on the area of Finland,
in the context of Finland and Finnish elderly people,
So, in this study we tested out a number of commercial games
like Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Kinect games, stuff like that,
and also we tested out in-house games by
Turku Game Lab as well.
Finally we designed and implemented
digital game based system called the Skiing Game,
which is particularly cross country skiing activity
in a digital platform.
So, we tested out this game with
Finnish elderly people in Finland and also
Japanese elderly people in Japan as well.
What were the main findings and
conclusions of your thesis?
All right, in this study we found out that
the Finnish elderly people, they had very,
not very, I mean like relatively negative
attitudes towards digital games
before they play the game, right.
And they had that kind of misconception,
for example they think digital games are
not for the older people, they are only for
the younger generation.
And they think they cannot play the game
because it is too difficult to play,
they have that kind of misconception,
but after they had played the game,
they found that okay, digital games are interesting,
they are fun to play, stuff like that.
So, it means their attitudes toward digital games
have become more positive than before.
And they recommended that playing
digital games can be an alternative solution
for them to exercise.
But one exception is that and they would go for
conventional way of exercising in the first place.
If they do not have access
to that kind of exercises,
they will use digital games.
They also recommended that playing digital games
can be very useful for their
home-based exercise activity,
because if they cannot go out to the
nursing home
because of the weather is, stuff like that,
they can use digital games
as a form of exercise at home.
So this are the findings and also these
findings
can be insightful for the Finnish healthcare practitioners
and also the policymakers to think about
introducing digital game-based intervention
to the elderly people in elderly homes
and also in our family homes as well.
The findings from the cross country usability testing
we found that Finnish silver games are
well received by the non finished
elderly people
so our recommendation is that
the Finnish game companies
can
think about expanding their silver games into
the international market as
well.
That sounds very multifaceted and interesting. -Sure.
One interesting part of your work was that
you did most of the work overseas,
not physically here in the department. -Yeah.
So how that all worked for you?
Yeah, that's true.
I spent most of my time oveseas
when I was doing my PhD.
But my supervisors are very
supportive to me
so I always keep close contact
with my supervisors, through our different channels,
for example, I use Skype, emails
and other types of messengers to
communicate with my supervisors.
From time to time we had video conferencing
to discuss about my progress
my problems, my future plans,
we always discussed through these channels.
One thing I would like to highlight is that
the administration team in
Department of Future Technologies and also
in University of Turku, they are
very supportive to me as well.
So I completed all of my tasks without
much difficulties. So, being an off campus
student, most of my time, I think I make
sure to put a certain schedule on my PhD tasks
particularly in manuscript preparation
and also thesis writing and stuff like that.
So, in conclusion, in any circumstances
if you are patient enough
I think you will be able to make it.
Thank you for those advices and
congratulations for your PhD.
Thanks for having me, thank you.
