Healthy Aging: What the Research Tells Us

Applications of psychological research to the design of technology may enhance the lives of the older population. Efforts to reach older consumers are often hampered by lack of understanding of the cognitive and physical capabilities or the preferences of this population. The quality of numerous activities of daily living both in the workplace and at home can be improved by attention to human factors research and applications. One area that could benefit tremendously from applications of psychology involves the health care arena including home-based medical tasks. For instance, current devices meant to provide home medical care are prone to serious error by older adult users.

One challenge is to design products so that older adults can realize their maximal performance potential and are assisted in doing so. Proper age-related research conducted to advance both theory and practice can bring this to fruition. One valuable source of data relevant to these age-related concerns is the area of human factors. The field of human factors is interdisciplinary with psychology representing one of the major contributing disciplines. Research findings and theories from disciplines such as psychology, engineering, and computer science contribute to the knowledge base of human factors. The focus of the presentation will be to provide a brief introduction to the field of human factors and to illustrate the relevance of the field to technology use. Older adults' willingness to use and interest in new technologies will be illustrated. Research on a prototypical home health care device will be discussed. Such devices are prone to error by older users, the design of the system yields many opportunities for error, and the existing instructions are inadequate to assist novices in learning how to use the system. The field of human factors provides direction for the improvement of the design and training for use of home health care technologies as well as other new technologies.

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