A study of the elderly people’s perception of wearable device forms

With the advent of aging society, the population with chronic diseases also increases accordingly. Chronic diseases require monitoring on physical parameters at regular intervals so as to understand the conditions of disease control for an individual case. It is expected to achieve the goal of early detection and early treatment so that the expenses for medical treatments can be reduced. With the advance of technologies and with the application of communication technology and electronic medical devices, providing human-centered and diversified health care services has gradually become the development trend of the care services for the elderly. The external form design of wearable products for medical treatments affects consumers’ willingness to buy and operation convenience. Therefore, the development gradually moves toward designing products based on a user-centered model. This study is to investigate the elder consumers’ perception of product forms. Wearable devices which monitor sleeps were selected as the target product for investigation. Tests were conducted by questionnaire surveys and the classification of groups was implemented by factor analysis and cluster analysis. After that, the analysis of variance was conducted so as to understand the condition of deviations. The results indicated that groups of different life patterns generated significant differences on the vocabularies for different forms of wearable devices.