Touch- and audio-based medication management service concept for vision impaired older people

A novel Near Field Communication (NFC) based solution to support medication management of vision impaired older users is presented in this paper. The service concept allows older users with vision impairments to manage their daily medications autonomously by providing them means to identify medicines and retrieve personal medication information. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept, an early prototype called BlindNFC was implemented. It is a NFC-enabled PDA with a basic functionality of reading the medicine name and dosage information aloud by touching the medicine package. The service concept was tested and evaluated with user studies in Finland and Spain, where altogether 39 older people with varying level of problems with their sight and other functional abilities participated in the studies. Findings revealed that older users learned and used the basic functionality of touch- and audio-based system quite easily. A set of design issues to be taken into account was identified. Users showed a high degree of satisfaction in the use of the BlindNFC device, together with the solution it offers. They found potential value in the technology also in tagging and identifying other everyday physical objects than medicine packages and using their own self-recorded audio messages for marking objects. However, users were not currently willing to adopt the system for continuous use, as many of them had established over time methods for managing the medications, and were therefore observed reluctant to change these ways.