Usability Problems Experienced by Elderly Users in Home Healthcare Systems

Several research papers have presented crucial work on the needed functionality of home healthcare systems as well as on methods for evaluating the usability of such systems. There is also considerable work on usability problems experienced with systems that are targeted at medical staff. Yet, much less effort has been devoted to identification of usability problems in systems targeted at elderly patients. This paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by presenting two empirically based usability evaluation studies of different home healthcare systems targeted at elderly users. The aim is to understand key usability problems that this type of target group experience while using such systems. Findings show that a group of elderly test subjects experience a high number of problems compared to a younger control group. In particular, the group of elderly subjects primarily experienced a high number of information related problems regarding e.g. technical information and ambiguous menu labeling. Furthermore, it was found that the group of elderly subjects was more sensitive to lack of overview of menu items. In practice, the studies presented in this paper can be applied to inform designers of home healthcare systems to be particularly aware of the type of information given in a user interface and how this is given to an elderly target group.