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Design and development of Medication Assistant: older adults centred design to go beyond simple medication reminders

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Abstract

Older adults have much to gain from bringing technology into their daily lives. The extent to which this is possible strongly depends on careful design and accessible, easy-to-use products, developed using an older adults centred methodology . This paper follows this design approach and puts it to the test in developing “Medication Assistant”, an application aimed to contribute to lower the high levels of non-adherence to medication in the ageing population. This application is developed following an iterative method centred on the older adults and interaction design. The method repeats short development cycles encompassing the definition of scenarios and goals, requirements engineering, design, prototyping and evaluation by the target users. The evaluation of the increasingly refined prototypes is of paramount importance in this methodology, gathering information about the strengths and weaknesses of the application. These, along with user suggestions, constitute an important starting point to support further improvements in the subsequent development cycle. The first three development cycles for “Medication Assistant” are presented, highlighting the main aspects of each stage, and how the evaluation performed, at the end of each cycle, provided feedback to further refine the application with new and improved features. At its current stage, “Medication Assistant” obtained very positive evaluation outcomes and already provides a set of useful features concerning medication management. These features go beyond the typical medication reminders and aim to provide a first contribution towards a more holistic approach to medication non-adherence.

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Notes

  1. https://www.true-kare.com.

  2. http://pillboxie.tumblr.com/.

  3. http://www.smartphones4seniors.org/.

  4. http://www.statmt.org/moses/.

  5. http://www.infarmed.pt.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all the participants in the different evaluation sessions. A word of appreciation is also due to Infarmed, and in particular to Dr. Rui Fragoso, for making the medication database available. This work is part of the Smart Phones for Seniors (S4S) project, a QREN Project (QREN 21541), co-funded by COMPETE and FEDER, and partially funded by project Cloud Thinking (funded by the QREN Mais Centro program, Ref. CENTRO-07-ST24-FEDER-002031).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DETI – Department of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics, IEETA – Institute of Electronics and Telematics Engineering of Aveiro, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    António Teixeira, Flávio Ferreira, Nuno Almeida, Samuel Silva, Ana Filipa Rosa & Diogo Vieira

  2. Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, Tomar, Portugal

    José Casimiro Pereira

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  1. António Teixeira
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  2. Flávio Ferreira
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Correspondence to António Teixeira.

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Teixeira, A., Ferreira, F., Almeida, N. et al. Design and development of Medication Assistant: older adults centred design to go beyond simple medication reminders. Univ Access Inf Soc 16, 545–560 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-016-0487-7

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