Developing an integrated display of health data for aging in place

The goal of aging in place is to allow seniors to remain in the environment of their choice with supportive services as needed, living independently in old age. TigerPlace, a retirement community of residents assisting aging in place, has been equipped with different types of sensors with the potential of monitoring, identifying, and predicting deteriorating health conditions. Currently, the seniors' medical records and telemedicine data are stored in separate systems. Date- and time-stamped sensor data are stored in SQL databases and are not linked with the senior's personal health records. The systems related to health care data and daily activities are separately stored and do not communicate with each other. Using a human-centered design and evaluation framework, we conducted user, task, function, and representation analyses, which provide an in-depth description of user characteristics, preferences, systems functionality, basic tasks, and effective representations in such an information-distributed setting. In this article, we report our investigation of such an aging in place setting and present our preliminary results of analyses on design requirements and a couple of human-centered prototypes aiming at an integrated health data display. The project was proposed to design a holistic and comprehensive view of senior residents' health data that are currently available in disparate systems. The integrated health data display must be human-centered and should inform senior residents and health care providers in a timely manner to support decision making. This design demonstrates our effort to prototype a human-centered user interface for enhancing aging in place. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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