Enabling health literacy for older adults through anamorphic perspective

The US Institute of Medicine defines health literacy as "the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions." As more health resources move to computer access it is important that people are able to obtain the information and understand it from computers. This is especially important for older adults that might be less able to read and understand health resources from a stationary or bedridden situation. In this paper, we describe a new visualization technique for helping stationary older adults better read from computers. We use the concept of anamorphic perspective and large displays to extend stationary adults' reading area thus allowing the benefits of large displays from a stationary position. We present two experiments on the technique and show that it has potential to help stationary individuals read from far away distances.