The ability to perform instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) allows individuals to live independently. Several evaluation tools can be used to evaluate IADL. Although questionnaire-based evaluation tools are widely used, they have the issue of potentially being reported differently than the participants' actual abilities. Virtual reality-based IADL (VR-IADL) programs have been proposed for improved assistance and evaluation. However, previous VR-IADL programs had limited scenarios and were difficult to use. To overcome this, we developed a ten-scenario version of a tablet-based VR-IADL program. To test the performance of the tablet-based VR-IADL program, two studies were performed. In Study 1, we recruited 20 healthy adults to develop the VR-IADL scoring system, and in Study 2, 31 patients with idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder were recruited to test its validity. Participants in Study 2 were considered to be at high risk of mild cognitive impairment, dementia, and Parkinson's disease. The results suggest that the VR-IADL score was positively correlated with cognitive tests and these correlations were better than those determined using existing tools. We believe that our tablet-based VR-IADL program is beneficial for older adults at high risk for neurodegenerative diseases.

Recent studies have demonstrated that brain synchrony can indicate the quality of social interaction in real-world communication. However, there is a lack of research on measurement of brain synchrony during social interactions in remote AR. In this study, we investigated the brain synchrony of remote augmented reality (AR; Study 1) and face-to-face (FTF; Study 2) interactions. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy was used to measure the brain synchrony during the tangram puzzle task. In a collaboration condition, participants worked together to solve the puzzle. In an individual condition, participants solved the puzzle independently. We recruited 46 participants in Study 1 and 48 participants in Study 2. Study 1 showed there was a significant difference in brain synchrony between the individual and collaboration conditions, and a positive correlation was observed between brain synchrony and the task performance in the collaboration condition. A comparison between Study 1 and 2 suggested that the difference between the collaboration and individual conditions was maintained, and some differences were observed in the brain synchrony between the AR and FTF interactions. These results suggest that measurement of brain synchrony is beneficial for social interaction in remote AR collaborations. The implications of these results on future remote interactions are discussed.

Previous education studies suggested that “warming up” activities featuring interpersonal synchrony components help improve educational quality and social closeness between teachers and students. While educators are eager to incorporate augmented reality (AR) into remote educational settings, prior research has not investigated the beneficial impacts of interpersonal synchrony on remote AR education. This study investigates the effects of prior physical synchrony (PS) on learning outcomes, inter brain synchrony (IBS), and social closeness in remote AR education. 41 participants were recruited for learning English vocabulary from a teacher. They conducted a movement learning task using prior PS and physical asynchrony (PA). The results showed that the positive effects of warming up activity on quiz score, IBS, and social closeness were observed in the PS section, but not in the PA section. Moreover, we found a high correlation between quiz score and IBS but not with social closeness. These results suggest that prior PS is a beneficial component of remote AR education and that IBS could be used as an index for evaluating educational quality. The implications of these results for remote AR education are discussed.