Best Practices for Designing Electronic Healthcare Devices and Services for the Elderly

Abstract

Demographic change and associated shifts in the age structure lead to major challenges in health processes. One way to address this is to increase the use of telemedicine systems and services to ensure non-local yet individualized patient care, such as in rural areas. When considering new medical technology components, we must compensate for age-related changes in perception, cognition and motor skills to achieve user-centered design and take into account psychophysical effect relationships to achieve sustainable acceptance for technology integration. This paper presents various best-practice examples for participatory investigation into influencing factors, with a focus on the different times and periods within the lifecycle of a telemedical product and associated services. In addition to giving concrete design hints derived from individual studies, the paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the paradigms used and provides recommendations for user-centric development with old and very old patients.