Preventing injuries: How augmented reality reduces fall risks in pseudo-natural environments

Falling is a major contributor to injury-related incidents and the 2nd most likely cause for unintentional injury deaths world-wide. Here, we therefore tested a vision aid for obstacle detection during a navigation task in pseudo-natural environments (virtually created cities). The vision aid had nine different setups (i.e. no highlighting of hazardous objects vs. eight different hit / false alarm ratios [cue validity]). Elderly and healthy, young adults completed the navigation task. As in real life, elderly walked slower and fell more often in pseudo-natural environments, suggesting the ecological validity of such safe experimental setups to test hazardous situations. Importantly, the vision aid reduced the risk of falling (by up to 33 %) for both age groups. Thus, our study highlights that a vision aid which augments reality could be a substantial contributor in preventing falls and related injuries, decreasing the financial burden on the health system and increasing life quality.