Improving the quality of life of elderly people is an emerging issue within our information society for both research and development. This paper addresses some issues on the development of applications for mobile devices, which have been designed to enhance the quality of life of the growing number of elderly people, and how they can be made more acceptable to the target population. We summarize some relevant issues in order to devise a research methodology to cover more than just the technological and physical aspects of user interfacing but also psychological and sociological aspects. One aspect of achieving this aim is to confront designers and developers with those problems that the elderly face daily and which are not easily understood -especially by younger designers and developers. Finally, we present some issues on how to simulate certain physical constraints of elderly by using the AgeSim, which is a simulation suit. However, not only physical but also cognitive impairment cause problems amongst elderly and result in fear, anxiety and consequently in rejection. The main goal of this paper is to raise awareness amongst developers on which problems are to be taken into considerations during design and development of mobile applications for the elderly.
Augmented Reality (AR) applications are becoming increasingly available for everyday applications. In this paper, we concentrate on how to design and develop applications for educational purposes with the use of the ARToolkit and present an example from the area of human medicine. Since good Usability is essential, especially for non-expert end users, including both children and the elderly, we put particular emphasis on how to ensure good Usability. For both groups of end users, this technology has high potential and can be of great benefit. Within a small scale usability study amongst children, we could gain first experiences in their interaction with such applications. An essential factor is the notion of play, which could be beneficial to transport difficult learning material. On the basis of the gained insight, we provide an outlook for further work and we conclude that elderly could also benefit from this technology.
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