Topic 3: Participatory Design for the Elderly for Managing Health Information - Designing a Personal Health Application for Older Adults to Manage Medications

Overview

This article is interesting as it discusses about how an iterative participatory design process using the various prototyping methods to develop an open source functional “Personal Health Application” (PHA) called the “Colorado Care Tablet” (CCT), that all allows older adults and caregivers the ability to manage their personal health information.

Method

There were two types of iterative design method used Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE), and Instant Data Analysis (IDA).  The think aloud method was used and the participants were being recorded.

User Needs Assessment

This was done via home interviews and the researchers were able to get a glimpse on how the older adults managed their medications.

Low Fidelity Prototype

To quickly evaluate multiple prototypes the researchers used paper based low-fidelity prototypes.

Card Sorting

To learn how the older adults do perceive the User Interface Design to be too abstract or very detailed card sorting was done to understand their mental model.

High Fidelity Prototypes

After sufficient information was obtained about user needs and interface expectations, the researchers then created the High Fidelity Prototypes for the rest of study using a Lenovo Thinkpad X60 as the hardware, software such as HTML and Adobe Flex.

Reference 

Khan, D. U., K. A. Siek, et al. (2010). Designing a personal health application for older adults to manage medications. Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Health Informatics Symposium, ACM.