Aged Care & Disability
Empathy-driven tools that improve training outcomes, enhance client experiences and support staff wellbeing. This category covers experiences designed for care providers, councils and community services, built around stepping into someone else's perspective rather than simply reading about it. Our published work in this specific sector to date is the Central Coast Council program below; we are open about that scope and do not claim aged-care-specific engagements beyond it here.
PTR's published work in this category is a disability awareness program, not an aged-care-specific one. First-person VR perspective-taking has independent research support for building empathy in both fields, though the aged-care evidence base is still early.
Work in this sector
Central Coast Council: disability awareness
Central Coast Council developed a VR experience as part of its wider strategy to improve disability access and inclusion, particularly for local business and for sport and recreation activities, after identifying a need to raise community awareness of what people with disability face day to day. Co-designed with the Council's Access and Inclusion Reference Group, the experience gives users a first-person perspective of living with disability in two everyday settings, a beach and a shopping centre, so participants can reflect on the different challenges and barriers involved. It has since been run across the community more than 200 times, and has been incorporated into teacher training programs, internal council staff training and CSIRO-facilitated sessions.
Immersive perspective-taking is well suited to disability and aged-care contexts, where a written or spoken description of someone else's lived experience often falls short of building the same recognition, and the same behaviour change, that a first-person simulation can prompt. This matches the Disability Royal Commission's own finding that community attitudes, not physical access alone, are a fundamental driver of poor outcomes for people with disability, and its call for reforms that reach the whole community rather than compliance alone.
For aged care specifically, VR-based first-person simulation is an active, independently researched approach: a 2024 systematic review of VR simulation for building empathy in informal dementia caregivers found it does foster empathy through first-person perspective-taking, though the review's authors note that no controlled trials with group comparisons exist yet, so the evidence base, while promising, is still early. Separately, Australia's National Dementia Education and Training Standards Framework, funded by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, was created in direct response to training gaps the Royal Commission into Aged Care identified, underlining that structured, competency-based training is now a formal sector priority.
Where this page is honest about scope
Aged care and disability are two different populations with different regulatory contexts. PTR's one case study on this page is a disability program; we have not delivered aged-care-specific work to date, and this page should not be read as implying otherwise. The VR-empathy evidence base for aged care specifically is still early, as the cited 2024 review notes.
What practice looks like in aged care and disability services
Four of the moments we build practice for in this sector. These are rendered illustrations, not footage from a client build.
Reported by a 2024 systematic review: VR simulation builds empathy in dementia caregivers through first-person perspective-taking, but no controlled trials with group comparisons exist yet. Int. J. Mental Health Nursing, 2024
Sources and further reading
- Virtual reality-based simulation intervention for enhancing the empathy of informal caregivers of people with dementia - International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 2024
- National Dementia Education and Training Standards Framework - Dementia Training Australia, funded by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing
- Final Report - Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, 2023
This work sits alongside PTR's wider approach to empathy-building VR, including the Everyday Inclusion and Mind Shift modules in our VR library, and our government and public-sector work with the same council. As this sector grows, we will add engagements here in the same way: named, sourced and linked back to the case study behind them.
Our approach to immersive training · The PTR VR Library · Government & Public Sector · All industries