Mobile Health Generation Gap

I’m spending this week in Utah with my parents. It’s great for my kids to be around their grandparents for such a long time period. Plus, my parents live in such a beautiful place in the mountains. However, last night we had an interesting experience. My 9 year old son was playing a game on an HP Windows 8 tablet. Soon his aunt joined him in playing the game. Then, my 6 year old daughter joined in with my 3 year old watching near by.

After they’d played the game for a little while, the tablet somehow made it over to grandma as my children and sister invited my mom to play the game on the tablet. Her reaction was pretty amazing. She was almost afraid to even have the tablet on her lap. My guess is that she was afraid to break it.

I then hopped in on the action and asked my 3 year old to teach grandma how to play the game. My three year old son happily handed the tablet to grandma and started showing her how you touch the screen at appropriate times to play the game. My mother never once put her finger on the tablet (maybe she was afraid to get fingerprints on it).

To add to the comparison, I had my laptop out and had a baby picture of my oldest son on my laptop. She asked me if I could make it bigger. Then, she proceeded to take her 2 fingers and try and expand the picture by touching the laptop screen. Of course, nothing happened because the laptop didn’t have a touch screen.

Another example was when I was in the car driving to Utah. We were having some discussion and a question came up and we didn’t know the answer. My 9 year old said, “Did you ask Galaxy?” (Galaxy is like Siri on the Samsung S3)

These are just simple illustrations, but they are important ones. My mother is completely averse to the technology. My children assume that everything works using touch. Developing mobile health applications for each of these types of users is very different. It’s going to take a pretty unique mobile health application to be able to be adopted by across all generations.

Sure, I’ve heard that many seniors are great at technology. It’s true that we probably underestimate seniors’ ability to use and benefit from technology. However, the mobile health app developers that don’t keep age differences in mind will quickly learn the differences once users start downloading their app.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • To paraphrase Indiana Jones, It’s not the years kid, its the style. I don’t envy interface designers who have to take into account a slew of different user approaches, experience and expectations. Putting it all on a small screen device makes it even more daunting.

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