Hospital Web Application Design for Elderly Patients

The aim of this project is to develop an elderly friendly web application which can be used to book hospital appointments online and also interact with Doctors via skype. It also can be used by doctors to maintain patient records which can be given read access to patients to their records.

This aim also needs us to answer few things and the first one would be to address the needs of ageing population in learning how to use a computer if they don't know already and also using a web application which would cater their needs and make their lives easy. We will also discuss the specific difficulties faced by the ageing population in learning computer skills which will in turn help them using a web application easily.

Older adults and technology

Health takes a down turn when a person gets old and in the future years the number of older adults are going to increase according to many statistics. This could lead to being hospitals and clinics overfilled and become more in demand. Due to several factors, older adults will need supervision in their health from proper health care practitioners (Codreanu & Florea, 2016).

Perception of control is one of the most important factors in determining one's place on a social environment. To keep up with the new technologies younger generation use older generation are learning new computer technology faster than the younger generation (Morrell, 2002). To avoid themselves from socially isolating in this day and age older adults learn computer skills and also learn how to use internet. And some even contradict Morrell saying that older adults learn computer skills slower due to physiological changes which makes their learning process slow.

Older adults can integrate with the modern society by learning how to use new technology and also know how to learn new stuff from internet on their own. There are many E-learning programs which can be used by the ageing population to learn anything.

Most of the times older adults make the government of a country to to question its own policy towards people working after they retire. In the same way, they should also be able to integrate with the rest of the society to use latest web applications which are in the market and adapt to them and for them to adapt to it, the application creators should focus that there are plenty of older adults as well who might use their application in a day to day basis. To dive deep into the discussion of why web applications should be older adult friendly we will discuss the myths around older adults using web applications, how older adults are engaging themselves in learning latest technology and also the obstacles they face in using a web application (Githens, 2007). The goal of this project is to focus on the guidelines to be followed which can make the older adults involve in using web applications and also focus on other opportunities related to it in the favor of older adults and companies which develop web applications.

How retirement is changing?

Life expectancies have been increasing which has also increased the retirement years proportionally. Due to this the older adults value, all the benefits they get from employment after retirements such as financial, social, physiological and many more. Those employments may be full-time, part-time, paid, unpaid or even a temporary employment (Hale, 1990). With this and also seeing organizations dealing with new talents due to reduction of experienced workers due to retirement we could say that retirement is an outdated concept (Stein and Rocco, 2001).

With the research done in the past decade it is seen that the new talents also want to be working after they retire, which is about 80% in 2005 (Dychtwald, 2017). With this spirit the notion of retirement will be transformed in the future as these new talents are the ones which bring big changes in the current world.

The world-wide web or as we call the internet is not just for the younger generation. With many new applications like Quora, Facebook and many more we have seen that the internet is accepting individuals all around the world irrespective of the age and it is also seen that there has been an increasing number in the people of older age group. To determine the exact number would be difficult as any precise number which comes up will be obsolete after it gets recorded.