Take a quick tour of Rome’s Colosseum. Fly to Greece. Climb Mount Everest — heck, even all Seven Summits of the World.
Soon, Naperville seniors will be able to do that and more, all without stepping outside thanks to a new program by the Alive Center for Teens.
The west suburban nonprofit has announced a new teen-led program called Senior Simulators that aims to bring virtual reality experiences to seniors in assisted living facilities. The idea is to not just imbue a little extra fun into seniors’ routines but use VR to promote cognitive stimulation and emotional well-being, according to the Alive Center.
Senior Simulators will officially launch at Sunrise Assisted Living Naperville North at the end of January, program leaders say. Eventually, the Alive Center hopes to expand to other locations around the community.
With locations in Naperville, Aurora and Hanover Park, the Alive Center offers free after-school and summer drop-in hours for teens. Open to grades 5th through 12th, it supplies a wide range of programming, from clubs to tutoring to workshops.
At the core of its mission is to create the “confident, impassioned, resilient leaders of tomorrow,” according to the nonprofit’s website. As part of that vision, the Alive Center has a 20- to 30-member Teen Advisory Board that gives youth the opportunity to try their hand at leading their own initiatives and projects.
Board members exercise their leadership skills by piloting programming out of the Alive Center as well as by finding ways to serve their local community.
The latter goal is what inspired Senior Simulators. Advisory Board members Lukas Keane, Debabandya Dash and Sidharth Brahmandam are behind the venture. They’ve been working to make the idea a reality since August, they said.
The initiative was really a product of the Advisory Board trying to reach underfocused areas of the community, said Brahmandam, a sophomore at Naperville North High School.
“There’s a lot of focus on teens, which is good, right? The youth is our future,” he said. “But I mean, seniors tend to not get as much attention.”
The teen leaders started to brainstorm what they could do for seniors, especially whether there were any new experiences they could help facilitate from the perspective of a younger generation, Brahmandam said. They landed on VR, hoping the technology would give the seniors a chance to see and do things they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do.
“A lot of (this stuff) takes a lot of physical mobility to do and almost all of the people in assisted living are unable to do almost any of these things,” said Keane, a junior at Naperville North. “So it’s just a great way to provide that virtual experience without having to do the physical activity.”
As they launch Senior Simulators, the teen leaders have purchased 15 VR devices for the Alive Center. The investment was made possible through a $4,000 grant from Pellicano Family Foundation, a family-run nonprofit organization with the mission of helping young adults succeed, according to the foundation’s LinkedIn page.
Programming will be bimonthly. With each visit to Sunrise — as well as any other communities teen leaders bring Senior Simulators to — they will help residents try out VR equipment.
“We’ll help them along,” Brahmandam said. “Say they want to travel to Rome or something on the VR. We would show them how to do that and then we would talk them along.”
The possibilities of what adventures seniors will be able to go on with the equipment are expansive, the teen leaders say.
“It’s like bucket list items that you would love to do but you can’t,” said Dash, a sophomore at Naperville Central High School. “So sky diving, climbing a mountain. … With the technology advancement, it really feels like you’re there. We’re excited on that front. That we can see the smiles on these seniors’ faces when they see these places. That’s what we’re waiting to do.”
The benefits of VR for seniors have been noted in recent research.
Stanford University explored VR’s impact on seniors through a study published in late 2023. Some 17 senior communities around the country participated in the study, which found that large majorities of 245 participants between ages 65 and 103 enjoyed VR, improving both their emotions and their interactions with caregivers.
Conducted in partnership with the company Mynd Immersive, Stanford’s research found that almost 80% of seniors reported having a more positive attitude after experiencing a VR session and almost 60% said they felt less isolated socially.
In addition, almost 75% of surveyed caregivers said residents’ moods improved after using VR. More than 80% of residents and almost 95% of caregivers said talking about their VR experience enhanced their relationships with each other.
To that last point, teen leaders also hope that through Senior Simulators, they will foster connections with participants.
“One of the main reasons that we started doing this was just to increase generational interconnectedness,” Keane said. “I think that’s a really large gap in our community and society as a whole. It’s really difficult to get younger and older people to see the same viewpoint as they live such different lives and have had such different experiences.”
Using Senior Simulators to find common ground is especially important to Keane, whose grandmother is a resident at Sunrise.
“I mean,” he said, “just connecting with her more would be a great experience.”
Keane, Dash and Brahmandam are looking for teen volunteers to be a part of Senior Simulators. Anyone interested can reach out to the Alive Center at kandice@alivecenter.org.
The Associated Press contributed.
