Around the world, there is increasing pressure to provide cost-effective medical healthcare. This pressure, combined with increasingly aged populations in many countries, poses important new challenges. One response involves directing specific attention to the delivery of remote patient care, which has resulted in the use of a range of electronic devices by the elderly. These devices provide telehealth services, which are often delivered via a tablet device capable of sophisticated graphical representations and interactions.

This paper describes a thorough user experience design and improvement program focused on visual icons for a commercially available remote patient monitoring device. The methodology and findings in this study are likely to be of interest across the telehealth industry and indeed to the wider industry of personal devices.

The paper starts with a description of the “before” design, which has been radically changed through multiple usability rounds and refinements of both the icon design and the interaction design framework. There are significant visual changes in the “after” design, creating a strong family of icons with fonts and colors that are more easily distinguishable by the elderly, the target group. Furthermore, the study provides a significant restructuring of the relative importance of different actions to improve the discoverability and speed of access to emergency services appropriate to the user group under study.

The methodology is well thought out, and I am particularly pleased to see multiple rounds of usability and redesign within a single project.