A Generic Approach Towards Personalized Mobile Applications for Older Adults

With age come certain restrictions and impairments. The task of keeping the elderly independent demands high personal and financial effort. By providing personalized mobile applications to the elderly, we believe that older adults can be more independent with less need for additional assistance. The ageing process leads to a complex set of changes that influences our vision, hearing, cognition and motor control, and thus affects the way we experience a computer system. For example, some interaction paradigms as we know them may not be suitable for older adults, like for example the scrolling of text via touch gestures on a mobile display, which needs precise movement control that older adults may not have. In this paper, we propose a generic approach for building mobile applications for the elderly considering various age-related challenges. We suggest a technical approach for the implementation and show how it affects the development workflow. In order to evaluate our approach, we prepared interactive prototypes and tested them with elderly users. We could not identify serious problems related to the presented approach, but there is still room for improvements in terms of how information is presented.