Design Principles of User Interfaces for the Elderly in Health Smart Homes

The global trend of increasing longevity has brought an enormous challenge in developing smart technologies to preserve independence and quality of life among the elderly in their own residence. The homes we live in have been transformed into smart environments. Most studies on smart home for the elderly have focused on enabling technologies for aging friendly smart environments such as health telematics, fall detection and action recognition. With an emphasis on the health of the elderly, the concept of ‘health smart home’ was introduced as a variation of the smart home. Numerous research projects on health smart homes have implemented a variety of prototypes and described the state-of-the-art of smart systems etc. However, there is little research on the elderly’s interaction and experience in smart homes using systematic methods and evaluation metrics. The interactions of the elderly with digital devices, further, with the smart space should be intuitive otherwise the smart space will become an uncomfortable place, thus displeasing the elderly. The focus of this paper is on user interfaces in intelligent services, especially, targeted to support the elderly healthy home life. The aim of this paper is to develop design principles of the user interfaces for the elderly in smart homes. Through a critical review on the representative design principles for the elderly, we extracted specific criteria related to usability and user experience, and then structuralized them into a framework of user interfaces for the elderly. For identifying features of the aging friendly interfaces, we considered the elderly reduced abilities with a focus on assistive technologies for supporting their healthy housing life. The proposed framework could be a basis for the perspectives of future research directions on user interfaces for the elderly in smart environments.