CREATE Research Projects

The CREATE sites are working on various research projects to better understand the acceptance, design, and use of technology to help older adults age successfully. Each site is researching important study topics that will help to realize this goal. Below are examples of such studies.

Project 1: Virtual Reality to Support Cognitive Health and Engagement and Socialization Among Aging Adults


Older man using a VR set

The goal of this project is to design and evaluate an immersive Cognitive Activity Social Engineering (CAST) virtual reality technology that provides aging adults with a suite of virtual cognitive, social, and engagement applications. CAST will allow for virtual interactions, cultural, creative, and educational opportunities, and gaming.

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Project 2: Technology Support for Cognition and Social Engagement for Aging Adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI)


Older couple smiling while using iPad

The goal of Project 2 is to develop and evaluate an intelligent adaptive system that provides cognitive support, social support, and engagement with older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Speech data will be collected through the reminiscence feature to study how language production data can be used as an early indicator of cognitive decline.

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Project 3: Technology Tools for Cognitive Support for Health Management Activities for Aging Adults with and without Mild Cognitive Impairment


Older woman using the computer computer

The goal of Project 3 is to support the cognitive components of older adults’ healthmanagement activities through development odigital assistant technology tools tailored to three exemplar healthcare management task activities: accessing support services, managing healthcare finances, and using the healthmanagement tools provided by Medicare.gov.

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