A Usability Inspection of Medication Management in Three Personal Health Applications

We present the findings of a cognitive walkthrough inspection on three Personal Health Applications (PHAs). Two of the PHAs, Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault, are general purpose PHAs that are freely available to the general public. The last PHA, Colorado Care Tablet, is a prototype PHA that was designed specifically for older adults to manage their medication information. Older adults need a way to manage medications and share this information with their caregivers and healthcare providers to avoid complications during transitions of care. PHAs provide people with the ability to collect and share health information. However, given the problems older adults have with navigating applications and web pages, we needed to inspect currently available PHAs and identify problems older adults may have when using them for medication management before conducting user studies. Based on our findings, we encourage the design community to place more of an emphasis on interface consistency and tightly coupling information with links.