Are M-health Applications Accessible for Elders?

Sammanfattning: The rapid advancements in technology have brought benefits to many sectors, including the health sector. Popular technologies related to e-health and m-health have transformed traditional healthcare and are getting more popular among physicians and patients. Since these technologies, like any other, are constantly changing and improving, some groups of people who are not digitally literate enough to use them are getting neglected. One of those groups is elderly people, who are known for struggling with the use of technology. Considering that m-health applications have proven to be of big essence for elders, this raises a big issue. Therefore, this study aims to further explore the accessibility of m-health applications for elderly people. For this to be done, existing literature about this topic has been compared with empirical findings derived from conducting interviews. The research is based on the Senior Technology Acceptance Model (STAM) which helped us understand elders’ adoption of technology. The study concludes that m-health applications are not accessible enough for elders. Therefore, we proposed the accessibility guidelines for the design of m-health applications which will help improve their accessibility. Along with providing these guidelines, we emphasized the importance of including elders at every stage of m-health development and testing processes and raising awareness about this issue among everyone involved in m-health development.