ABlendedRealitySpace for Socially Isolated Older People 83 Fig. 6.4 Prototype physical rehabilitation game with two different tangible interaction devices Practical research work based on experimentation needs to be carefully planned and executed with the prototype. The design and development should also be conductedwithallparticipantsovertheperiodinaniterativecycleincludingdesign, use, evaluate and modifying the whole system before final implementation. ABlendedRealitySpaceforSociallyIsolated Older People The human-experiential design approach is ideally suited for age-related critical situations. Park (1992) has described age-related decline in cognitive function. For example, elderly people often have difficulties utilising explicit knowledge and working memory for tasks such as understanding texts, making inferences, encoding information into memory, and retrieving information from memory. In contrast, other mental processes show little or no decline with age. Recent notable approachestothisissuehavetriedtoimprovecognitivefunctionbyexploitingintact cognitiveprocesssuchasimplicitmemory(BallesterosandReales2004,Ballesteros et al. 2007, 2009), which refers to “memories from prior experiences revealed by performance effects in the absence of deliberate recollection” (Zacks et al. 2010, p.305). Elderly people with mild cognitive impairment and dementia still retain concreteimplicitskillseveniftheyloseexplicit,abstractknowledgeandskills.They arestill capable of using and beinginfluencedby theirpastknowledge,whetherthey areawareofitornot.Thisisanautomaticorunconsciousformofmemory(Schacter 1987). They have knowledge that their bodies physically remember, as it were, but explicit sources of knowledgesuch as a user’s manual, verbal assistance, and so on, are unsuitable for them. Designing simple and adequate representations for peripheral media using tangible objects is a key part of developing better combinations of the physical and virtual for this group. The tangible object in the system plays a role to wake up implicit memory in which previous experiences support the performance of a task without conscious awareness of those previous experiences. It has to be designed to link an everyday object and activity that humans remember, for example, how to placefingersonacoffeemugorknotatie,withoutconsciouslythinkingaboutthese activities.