A Spoonful of Sugar: Understanding the Over-the-Counter Medication Needs and Practices of Older Adults

Abstract

Understanding the needs of various stakeholders throughout the design process is key for creating consumer health applications that are usable, effective, and useful for the people that use them. This paper discusses the findings of an exploratory study aimed at understanding the current practices, information needs, and challenges of older adults (65 years and older) when selecting over-the-counter (OTC) medication. The context of this study lies in understanding older adults with the purpose of identifying opportunities for a consumer health application to assist them with selecting an appropriate OTC medication based on their health history.This research contributes to the understanding of the current practices of older adults as related to OTC medication selection. In addition, this paper provides a discussion of opportunities for future applications to help facilitate this task for older adults.

Designing an over-the-counter consumer decision-making tool for older adults

“…Prior work included a formative study that focused on understanding the OTC decision-making practices of older adults [26]. Results from the prior study were used in the current study to inform the design of an initial prototype that was used in review sessions with HCI researchers and as a probe in sessions with older adults.…”

“…A formative study was conducted previously to identify challenges and barriers to selecting appropriate OTC medication for older adults [26]. The formative study included semi-structured interviews with older adults (n = 10) that focused on understanding older adults' current OTC decision-making practices and identifying challenges and barriers to OTC medication information.…”

“…Many factors affect a person's ability to understand health information including how the information is presented [4,32]. For older adults, one of the primary challenges with OTC medication is the size of the font used on the labels [26,46,48]. However, formatting, information order, external tag placement, and language used may also influence how well OTC medication labels communicate information to consumers [19,28,34,46,48].…”

“…Understanding the decision-making process has been cited as a key area for understanding OTC behaviors among older adults [1,26]. Consumer decision-making is concerned with ''how consumers develop and use strategies for making decisions, how different amounts of prior knowledge influence consumer choice processes, how consumers adapt to different decision strategies, and how consumers categorize products'' [5].…”

“…However, oftentimes these sources are underutilized due to other factors. For example, the small print on the label is noted as a recurring challenge for OTC consumers, especially the older adult population [19,26,45]. Understanding health terminology can also be challenging and may impact how consumers are able to comprehend the OTC medication label [32,26].…”