Controlled Trial of a Health, Leisure and Communication Tablet App for Elderly

Background: Currently there are thousands of tablet apps for consumers but most of them are focused in technology heavy users. This situation is a discrimination case for elderly people, frequently the people who are not used to information technology devices, but it is also a missed opportunity to help them to improve their quality of life. In a situation of increasingly aged population and health system crisis, it is getting more important to find new ways of taking care of the elderly with the higher efficiency. Innovations used commonly by most of the society like mobile devices, internet and cloud computing are a great opportunity for elderly wellbeing. Mobile technology may be used to take care of elderly, but can also be a new way to empower their participation in the society, keep them connected with family and friends, facilitate the learning or to give them a new entertainment option. Objective: To examine the effectiveness of a freely available health, leisure and communication tablet app, validate the user experience focused design and monitor the feelings of relatives. Methods: Functional evaluation of eldersarea app by spot checking and interviews made to 10 individual users between 59 and 83 years old: 7 in their own environments or homes (not used to technology and with any kind of dependence), and 3 in office (occasional technology users). The test recorded in video was made following this scheme: presentation of the objectives, presentation of eldersarea app, signature of participation consent, app use in a tablet. The test was made in a bq Edison tablet, with Android version 4.0.4. and eldersarea app version 1.2.2. before answering the questionnaire. The videos recorded and the questionnaires were analyzed by tioman & partners team in order to deepen the resuts. Results: 100% of the users highlighted that the application is easy to use, and 80% of them said that it was very intuitive. 90% of the elderly asked, consider that the technology could be a part of their lives. In this sense, the platform can be used without any help by people without technology knowledge, something very important for their empowerment and autonomy. All of the users answered wanted to continue using the app and would be pleased to have it on their own. 90% of the users consider that the videoconferencing option is very useful, moreover for people with relatives abroad. 70% of the users consider that the leisure options are important, so they can keep in touch with other people using images, music and videos. This option has also value for entertainment. 70% of the users consider that the health option is relevant in order to track values like weight and blood pressure. They would like to use the service to get in touch with the doctor, arrange meetings with the health service and store information about their health. Talking about the design, 80% of the people asked where pleased with it and 100% thought that the contents are well distributed, something very helpful in order to use the app correctly and easily. []