Older Adults & Home Medical Device Interaction: Interface Type Comparison, Display Design, and Touch Gesture Analysis

This dissertation took into consideration the home environment, users, medical devices and their interaction, focusing on the nature of users/older adults to investigate design recommendations for home medical device interfaces. Addressing the physical, perceptual and cognitive needs of older adults, three studies were designed to test and evaluate the design. The experiments focused on a single device, a blood pressure monitor, as representative of Class II medical devices. The purpose of this dissertation was to provide design recommendations to improve the safety, quality and effectiveness of home medical device interfaces for older adults.;In Study 1, three blood pressure monitor interfaces were assessed by 30 older adult participants (65 years-75 years) in two stages: a) Initial Engagement, and b) After Instruction. The three interfaces were: A) Physical button interface, B) Touch-screen interface - duplicated from physical button interface, and C) Touch control redesigned interface. Time to complete all six tasks, the count of failures, mental workloads and preferences were measured in this study.;Study 2 required older adult participants to perform 13 core touch gestures on an iPad and rate their experience performing the gesture on five attributes (Ease of Use, Effort, Learn, Remember, and Overall).;In Study 3, there were five selected touch gestures designed for unlocking an iPod Touch (from locked status). Fifteen older adult participants and 16 child participants performed the unlocking task on the iPod Touch to investigate the child resistance and older adult friendliness of the touch gestures.;A primary finding in Study 1 was that touch-screen control was intuitive to use. For a new device during the first use, older adults had better performance controlling the blood pressure monitor with touch-screen interface than the physical button interface. After learning and with practice, there were no significant differences between the two interface types. Older adults subjectively preferred a redesigned touch-screen interface more than the original physical button interface or a touch-screen interface directly replicating the original physical button interface.;All 13 core touch gestures in Study 2 were successfully performed by older adults. In addition to objective performance measures, older adults rated the 5 usability attributes (Ease of Use, Effort, Learn, Remember, and Overall) positively for all 13 touch gestures.;Among the 13 core touch gestures, five were selected to be tested for older adult friendly and child resistant design in Study 3. These five gestures were: Drag (...