Evaluating the Usability of Home Healthcare Applications

Abstract

Home healthcare applications have the potential to reduce healthcare costs and improve the quality of life for elderly people who prefer to stay in their own homes instead of making frequent visits to the hospital. This requires ambient assisted living applications that fulfil relevant needs of the users; yet it also requires applications with a high level of usability in order to achieve user acceptance, especially when the target user group is elderly people. This chapter proposes a method to be used for conducting usability evaluations of smart healthcare applications. It includes a report from a usability evaluation where the method was used to evaluate a simple home healthcare application for collecting personal health data in the home. The usability evaluation demonstrates that the method presented here facilitates identification of key usability problems, while the efforts required to conduct the evaluation are considerably reduced compared to conventional methods.