Integrating Universal Design (UD) Principles and Mobile Design Guidelines to Improve Design of Mobile Health Applications for Older Adults

Mobile technology can improve lives of older adults through remote health monitoring (telehealth), memory aids (including medicine reminders), personal data management, and social and communication assistance. Although numerous design guidelines, design principles, and heuristics have been developed to improve the user interface (UI) design of mobile applications for older adults, many usability problems are still reported. Alternatively, universal design (UD) advocates designing products and interfaces usable by all people, with all ranges of abilities. Older adults population is diverse in terms of the ranges of limitations as well as combinations of limitations they have. Design guidelines targeted towards specific abilities and limitations are not effective in a case of multiple limitations or diversity of limitations in older adults. Applying design guidelines to UD principles would address diversity of limitations within this population group. This project explores the ways in which we can bridge discrepancies between the existing design guidelines and UD principles to improve design of mobile health applications for older adults. In this paper, we describe usability studies and redesign of the remote patient monitoring (RPM) mobile application UI for older adults, refined RPM mobile app interface using the UD approach, and a set of inclusive design guidelines that reconcile inconsistencies between design guidelines and UD principles.