E-Homecare : Towards a Touch-screen User Interface Development for Home Care of Elderly

Abstract: In order to find good solutions to face the aging problems, a European Union project-MonAMI was established with the main purpose of enhancing old people’s life by using mainstream technological platforms to deliver helpful services. This thesis project is a sub-project of MonAMI project which focus on design and develop a graphical user interface for a touch-screen monitor that is used to deliver several useful services to old people who live in their home environment. Universal design principles, evaluation results from older prototypes, characteristics are the fundamental design guidelines for the interface design. The development processes have followed both User-Centered Design process and a modified version of task-artifact development life cycle.   The biggest challenge for this thesis was to identify the most perceivable and acceptable design solution for the old user. This means the solution has to be good in both visual and logical way. Therefore, the solution is produced with an incremental progressive procedure. In this procedure, expert evaluation was used as the main method to filter out less perceivable ideas. A user test involved with two actual users was carried approaching to the end of the project and identified many critical issues in the solution. The final solution was presented with a low-fidelity prototype by using Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation to give the future product an insight view on the interface design for elder users.