Designing for Older Adults

As life expectancy increases in the affluent Western World, older workers and the retired form a large and growing proportion of the world's population.

Professionals working to develop systems and environments need to better accommodate the user needs of the older adult.

This new guide provides a practical introduction to human factors and the older adult.

It considers the subject primarily from an engineering psychology perspective, heavily grounded in today's scientific knowledge.

It shows how current understanding of age-related issues of perception, cognition, and movement control can be applied in practice, and provides a reference source with guidelines and advice for design issues ranging from lighting, computer input device selection, and web design, to training program development and work task design.

It draws on research orientated work and presents this in a form which can be used by the broad audience of product designers, health care practitioners, managers, and others who need answers to the problems and require sound recommendations for design.