Creating Opportunities: Co-designing an mHealth App with Older Adults

TL;DR

This study explores co-designing an mHealth app with older adults, integrating AI and wearable data to support physical activity, and provides insights for future development of AI health coaches for seniors.

Contribution

It introduces a novel co-design process involving older adults for an AI-powered health app with personalized and privacy-aware features.

Findings

User feedback on app usability and experience

Insights on chatbot conversation flow improvements

Guidance for implementing AI health coaches for seniors

Abstract

We conducted a qualitative co-design study with four adults aged 60+ to gather design insights on a Figma prototype and a generative AI (GenAI) chatbot for an app aimed at providing an AI coach to support older adults' physical activity. The initial design for both incorporates several novel aspects: a curated health knowledge base, personalised responses based on goals and health history, privacy considerations, integration with wearables for physical activity context, as well as dynamic context injection. The study yielded feedback on improving both the proposed user experience in the app and the conversation flow with the chatbot, and it will aid future work aimed at implementing a GenAI-powered health coach for older adults.