Design Thinking to Support the Development of a Safe Web-Based Health Information Seeking Platform for Older Adult Populations

Abstract— The pervasiveness of online mis/disinformation escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic. To address the proliferation of online mis/disinformation, it is critical to build safety into the tools older adults use to seek health information. On average, older adult populations demonstrate disproportionate susceptibility to false messages under the guise of informative authority and were the most engaged with false information about COVID-19 across online platforms when compared to other age-groups. In a design-thinking challenge posed by AARP to graduate students in a Digital Health course at Tufts University School of Medicine, students leveraged existing solutions to develop a health information platform that is responsive to both passive and active health information-seeking methods utilized by older adults in the United States. This paper details the design-thinking process employed, results of primary research, an overview of the prototyped platform, and insights relating to the design of effective health information-seeking platforms for older adults.