Designing Health and Fitness Apps with Older Adults: Examining the Value of Experience-Based Co-Design
Abstract
Identifying useful features of health and fitness technologies has the potential to lead to more effective pervasive technology interventions. Through collaborative creative processes, co-design provides useful insight and direction for the design of these technologies from populations such as older adults who are often neglected in design. Additionally, extensive technology experience prior to co-design may elicit richer feedback from users that may otherwise be unfamiliar with the intervention of interest. In this paper, we examine the value of experience-based co-design among older adults. We report on seven design sessions conducted with a total of 25 older adults, following a 10-week study of fitness app effectiveness. Sessions were grouped into users and non-users of the assigned app following the study. We found that continued use with the assigned application led to more robust, detailed feedback in design sessions, suggesting that long-term, prior use of sample technologies is an important prerequisite to ideating useful features for new health technology. We draw on these findings to make design recommendations, and discuss the values and guidelines of implementing experience-based co-design.
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When users, such as older adults, engage in co-design processes, they inform the design of technologies, such as social robots, from their expertise and lived experiences.
“When users, such as older adults, engage in co-design processes, they inform the design of technologies, such as social robots, from their expertise and lived experiences (Bate and Robert, 2006; Harrington et al., 2018).”
From Promising directions for human-robot interactions defined by older adults (2024) · cites this paper as Harrington et al., 2018
More research developing technologies are being conducted with older adults.
“More research developing technologies are also being conducted with older adults (Chu et al., 2021; Harrington et al., 2018), but there is a need for continued analysis of the process to address aspects of ageism (Mannheim et al., 2019).”
From Digital ageism: challenges and opportunities in artificial intelligence for older adults (2022) · cites this paper as Harrington et al., 2018
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- Authors
- Harrington, C. N., Wilcox, L., Connelly, K., Rogers, W., & Sanford, J.
- Affiliations
- Georgia Institute of Technology (US)
- Indiana University Indianapolis (US)
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 12th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2018-05-21
- Pages
- 15-24
- ISSN
- 2153-1633 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2890631779
- Cited by
- 102
- References
- 31
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 23 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 19 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 5
- FWCI
- 28.53
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (P01 AG17211-17S2)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Demography › Technology Use by Older Adults
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Mobile Health and mHealth Applications
- Keywords
- co-design, older adults, health apps, fitness apps, experience-based co-design, user feedback, application effectiveness, design guidelines
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