A team led by UCF’s Victoria Loerzel has developed a tablet-based game for older adults with cancer that’s designed to increase their use of strategies to manage side effects from chemotherapy. According to Loerzel, younger patients tend to be proactive about managing side effects, while older adults tend to take a “wait and see” approach.
In the game, patients make decisions for an avatar to prevent nausea and vomiting and decide what to do when it does occur. In a small preliminary study, “Those who played the game were proactive and didn’t have as much nausea as they could have, while the control group waited until they started to feel sick before they did anything,” says Loerzel. A new study will include 500 participants.
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