Why we made them
In our conversations with teams in care homes, hospitals and day centres, virtual reality never comes up on its own. It sits next to Tuesday's exercise class, the bingo, the family visit, the awareness day someone wants to mark and the cleaning of equipment between people. RVer is one activity in an institution's plan, not the only one.
So we made tools for the rest of the plan. They are all at rver.pt/en/ferramentas, run in the browser, and follow three rules:
- No sign-up. Open it and use it. No email, no account.
- Nothing leaves your computer. What you type stays in the browser until you print it or save it as a PDF.
- Made to print. To put up in the room, take to the team meeting or hand to the family.
And they are for people aged 10 to 100: care homes, inpatient wards, paediatrics, mental health, palliative care and rehabilitation.
1. Activity generator
The activity generator answers the weekly question: what do we do today, with these people, in this amount of time?
You choose who is taking part and how much time you have, by age, setting, mobility (walks independently, wheelchair, bedbound), format (one-to-one or group), time available and focus: memory, movement, social, sensory, language, calm or creativity. The generator returns the activities that fit, from a memory box to bottle bowling, from chain stories to a hand massage.
Each of the 35 activities comes with materials, steps and adaptations: what changes with cognitive impairment, with a child, with someone who is bedbound. At the end you print the whole selection.
The first nine are RVer sessions, all built on videos from the library: «a familiar place», «a break», «a concert», «somewhere new», «an old trade», «a guided tour», «a festival or tradition», «a car ride» and «a moment of faith». They come first because they are our tool. But the other 26 need no equipment at all.
2. Health awareness days calendar
World Alzheimer's Day, World Mental Health Day, World Hospice and Palliative Care Day, the International Day of Older Persons, Children's Day. Teams want to mark these dates, and they are usually remembered the day before.
The calendar brings together 31 days, from October 2026 to October 2027, each with a concrete activity idea. You can filter by theme (ageing, mental health, children and teenagers, illness and prevention, caring, music and dance), and the next day is always highlighted, with a countdown.
Each day has a button to add it to your calendar, and another adds them all at once. The file opens in Google Calendar and Outlook, and it is generated in the browser itself.
3. Life story form
The life story form is the tool we like most, because it is the starting point for everything else. You fill it in with the person and with someone who knows them well: what they like to be called, where they come from, the work they did, the important people, the songs, the food, the places, the routines, what calms them and what upsets them.
There are two versions: one for adults and older people, and one for children and teenagers, with school, friends, hobbies and «what helps when they are scared».
This is the only tool that saves nothing, not even in the browser. It is personal data on a computer that, in an institution, is almost always shared. You fill it in, print it or save it as a PDF, and the form stays with the institution, which is accountable for it under the GDPR.
With RVer headsets, the form has a direct use: the person grew up by the sea, and the team can take them there.
4. Weekly planner
The weekly planner builds the week one day at a time. Tap the day, then morning or afternoon, then the activities: the ones from the generator, with the RVer session highlighted. You can also drag, to change the order, to move an activity from morning to afternoon, or straight from the list into the day.
There is a button to repeat a day from Monday to Friday, which is how many weeks get built. The week is saved in the browser (it holds no personal data), and printing produces the whole week as a table, ready to put up.
5. Hygiene checklist
The hygiene checklist is for equipment that passes from hand to hand: RVer headsets, tablets and headphones. For each one, the steps before you start, between people and at the end of the day, with boxes to tick as you go.
The «immunocompromised person» option adds the extra steps, such as an individual cover or equipment that has just been cleaned. For RVer headsets there are two rules from the manufacturer worth putting up: clean the lenses only with a dry microfibre cloth, no liquids or alcohol, and never leave the headset in the sun.
The checklist does not replace your institution's protocol: the cleaning product is the one approved by infection control, and if in doubt, that protocol decides.
What these tools do not do
None of these tools assesses, measures or diagnoses. There are no scales, scores or clinical records. They help the team organise its work, and do not replace clinical guidance or the individual care plan.
And RVer?
The tools are free and will stay free, whether or not you use RVer. But they were made by the people who make RVer, and they connect to it naturally: the form tells you where the person grew up, the calendar gives you the theme, the planner sets the time, the checklist gets the headset ready. The rest is the session, with the team beside the person.
Is your team missing a tool? Tell us. The next ones will come from the suggestions of people on the ground.