Abstract
Healthcare technologies are slowly entering into our daily lives, replacing old devices and techniques with newer intelligent ones. Although they are meant to help people, the reaction and willingness to use such new devices by the people can be unexpected, especially among the elderly. We conducted a usability study of a fall monitoring system in a long-term nursing home. The subjects were the elderly with advanced Alzheimer's disease. The study presented here highlights some of the challenges faced in the use of wearable devices and the lessons learned. The results gave us useful insights, leading to ergonomics and aesthetics modifications to our wearable systems that significantly improved their usability and acceptance. New evaluating metrics were designed for the performance evaluation of usability and acceptability.
Highlights
Healthcare technology using wireless sensors has reached a high level of maturity and reliability and these devices are being deployed in homes/nursing homes for use in managing people’s health
The following are the evaluation criteria we developed to measure usability and acceptability: (1) willingness to use (WTU), (2) easiness to learn (ETL), (3) time to accept (TTA), (4) willingness to keep (WTK), (5) number of errors (NOE) due to incorrect interactions, Table 1: Usability and acceptability parameters
The usability study showed that the design and development of a monitoring device must consider its target users’ preferences before it can be broadly deployed
Summary
Healthcare technology using wireless sensors has reached a high level of maturity and reliability and these devices are being deployed in homes/nursing homes for use in managing people’s health. To take full advantage of the penetration of these pervasive systems in people’s wellbeing and reap their full benefits, the technologies must be minimally invasive and must be accepted by users willingly. A necessary condition for acceptance is the awareness of benefits to the user population in using the system. Among the elderly, who are the main beneficiary population of these monitoring devices, there is still reluctance on their part to use them. Even though an increasing number of the elderly are aware of the advantages of a pervasive health monitoring system, they rarely understand how it works
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
