A few weeks ago I went to a family gathering and brought along my Gear VR to demonstrate to my family. My mother, who is in her late 60's loved it immensely. I set her up with a street view app and dropped her in the little village she grew up in as a child. Someplace she hasn't been in years but talks about every day.

Watching her swirl around and comment on her surroundings was really amusing. She overheated the Galaxy phone several times and couldn't get enough of it.

My father is 84 years old and now living in a nursing home, where mom sits with him every day. He suffers from advanced Parkinson's, with increasingly bad dementia - lots of trouble parsing reality from fantasy, often mixing up TV shows with events in the real world. His life consists of nurses, wheelchairs, broadcast TV and a lot of sleep. He's miserable.

Mom pleaded with me to let him use the VR headset. Even though I wanted to, I just couldn't take the risk of it having some negative effect. He barely understood digital technology when he was still sharp, so the jarring effects of seeing an error message, getting a broken visual or something would be highly alarming in his current frame of mind. Plus I couldn't guarantee he wouldn't get some sort of psychosis or motion sickness from using it with his illness.

I really hope more research comes out about how VR affects the elderly, and people with dementia or other neurological disorders. Being bedridden in a hospital is the worst possible scenario for anyone and VR could be a godsend to people in this situation.