gms | German Medical Science

For elderly people in residential homes, the barriers to engage in physical activity and sports are very high. To activate a highly physically inactive group the consideration of sport-geragogic aspects and health-enhancing implications, which target individual, community and the environmental levels, is necessary. An important factor in motivating the elderly for physical activities is that the offers have to suit the specific living circumstances and needs and that the entrance barriers are very low. The project ‘Miniature golf comes to you’ addresses the elderly living in Vienna’s ‘homes for living’ and offers the possibility to experience indoor miniature golf with mobile courses, variable obstacles and a specific mechanism to pick up the ball. In a championship, persons from different apartment houses compete with persons from other houses in individual or team-competitions. Since the start of the project in 2002, more than 200 older persons regularly participated in this tournament. The main aim of this study was to evaluate this activation program and to ascertain the reasons for its wide acceptance and success. Furthermore, the question was raised as to which effects these moderate physical activities have on health and activities of daily living.

To evaluate the program, questionnaires and interviews with the participants, interviews with the organizers and the contact persons of the residential homes and participant observation were applied.

The results show that the project ‘miniature golf comes to you’ complies ideally with the requirements of the elderly. It inspires very old persons as well as handicapped persons and persons, who were never sporty before . The participants – and also frail ones - have begun again to step out of their homes regularly to engage in the competition or to visit other teams for a common training, for example. Considering the high number of very old and partly frail persons in this activation program, the number and quality of those activities, which are necessary to stay mobile, to sustain social contacts and to participate in public activities, is highly remarkable and shows the high health-enhancing relevance of this project.

The findings lead to the assumption that elderly seem to benefit as well from the surrounding demands of the participation in the tournament (mobility to reach the site of competition, activity to stay in contact with other people or to organize training teams, competence and creativity to arrange training facilities, …) as from miniature golf itself. Even the fact that this competition is organised as an indoor event in a protected area and embedded in traditional daily social routine, the reported status of well-being of the participants is very high. Especially the design, its included principles of sport-geragogic aspects with its consideration to the needs of the elderly makes the project ‘Minigolf comes to you’ so effective and a model of good practice for further activity programs for the least active segment, the oldest old.