DIME PROJECT

Aging in Place of Choice with Connected Health Technologies

From AgeTech innovation to sustainable implementation

AGETECH DEVELOPER: PRODUCT DESIGN

What makes designing for AgeTech different?

This section covers the elements of usability and design that are important to this population and to the care partners who often use the product alongside them.

AgeTech companies seeking meaningful adoption and sustained use must consider the unique needs of older adults and their care partners from the earliest stages of development, using co-design and usability validation to ensure products are useful, accessible, and fit seamlessly into users’ lives and workflows.

Interfaces that neglect the physiological, cognitive, and sensory needs of older adults, and the distinct workflow requirements of family and professional care partners, often fail at adoption even when the underlying technology works.

Resistance to adoption is often about identity, not usability. Our interviews reveal that older adults may decline or abandon technology that is functionally accessible to them for reasons that have little to do with the interface itself. For example, products that are perceived to threaten older adults’ identity, autonomy, or privacy lead to poor adoption.

Where AgeTech product design commonly fails

Identity

EXAMPLE OF IDENTITY NOT CONSIDERED

A product that signals frailty or dependence rather than capability.

Autonomy

EXAMPLE OF PRIVACY NOT CONSIDERED

A design that feels like surveillance rather than support.

Privacy

EXAMPLE OF PRIVACY NOT CONSIDERED

Uncertainty about who sees the data a technology collects.

A technology can pass contrast and button size tests and still fail in the real world. Every design choice must protect user dignity alongside physical accessibility.

Personal Emergency Response Systems, the classic panic pendant, promised families peace of mind and older adults quick help after a fall.

What went wrong: In a UK study of adults aged 90 and older, call alarms went unused in about 80% of falls in which the person was alone and unable to get up. The pendant meant to help routinely, ended up on a nightstand or in a drawer instead of being worn.

The device relied on active, manual activation during a high-stress, disorienting event, precisely the moment a user is least able to complete a multi-step task.
It became a stigmatizing symbol of lost independence instead of a tool the user chose for themselves

The clinical outcome PERS tried to address, getting help for older adults after they’ve fallen, is an outcome that arguably older adults, care partners, and institutional buyers would be interested in. The problem is that the technology’s development didn’t incorporate ongoing older-adult feedback and, as a result, investment in the product went to waste on technologies that sat unused.

Key takeaway: Build products continually with your downstream user(s) (e.g., older adults, care partners, healthcare providers) and conduct usability validation, to build products that older adults actually use and thus actually benefit from.

Source: PMC, fall alarm non-use among older adults.

CASE STUDY

Using passive monitoring to reduce fall risk in senior living communities

Unlike traditional PERS pendants that sat unused because up to 80% of older adults failed to manually press the button after a fall, Withings employs passive connected bed sensors that monitor resident safety without requiring anyone to wear or actively operate a device. By automatically alerting care partners when a resident leaves bed at night and does not return, the system enables immediate intervention without relying on user action during a stressful event. This non-stigmatizing, workflow-integrated approach achieved a 79% reduction in fall incidents during its first month of deployment at a U.K. care home.

OLDER ADULTS ARE NOT A MONOLITH

Define who the technology is for

Older adult populations range from a fully independent 65-year-old managing one chronic condition to a 90-year-old with high support needs. A product built for one and marketed to all is likely to underperform for everyone.

Short Activity: Before writing a single design requirement, segment the population you’re building for, across three axes.

Living situation

Fully independent, community-dwelling with informal support, or assisted living.

Functional status

High function and can complete most activities of daily living independently, moderate impairment requiring some assistance, or high support needs.

Access

Rural or urban, digital literacy, and language.

For your specific segment, note the design and experience decisions that need to be informed by and co-designed with downstream older adult and care partner users.

For example, if your product targets older adults 75 and older, there’s a higher likelihood that some end users in that group have Alzheimer’s or a related dementia. That may call for specific design choices, such as voice activation, video-based instructions, simplified interfaces, and a deliberate way to bring care partners into the product experience. These are the kinds of questions you’ll need to take directly to your target users rather than assume.

We can’t tell you exactly what your users need, since that depends entirely on who you’re building for. What we can offer is a starting point. The DiMe AIPOC collaborative ran interviews and surveys with older adults and care partners, and the themes from that research are a useful place to begin before you go deeper with your own target users.

→ Contrast and text. WCAG 2.2 sets a 4.5 to 1 minimum contrast ratio for body text and 3 to 1 for large text and interactive elements. Some older adults with low vision or glare sensitivity read more easily with light text on a dark background; offering both modes lets users choose. Treat this as a floor to test from, not a target.

→ Multimodal feedback. Combining visual, auditory, and haptic feedback on the same action can improve confidence and task completion for older users in controlled studies. Providing feedback through multiple channels can accommodate differences in sensory abilities and preferences, making it easier for users to understand whether an action was completed and what to do next.

“Voice command I think is excellent… that has helped him more than actual hands-on… because there are times when the hands-on can be a bit much.”

– Care partner interviewed

→ Voice interfaces are preferred by some older adults interviewed, but be aware of some UX failures for adults with mild cognitive impairment due to forgotten invocation commands, high error recovery anxiety, and higher speech recognition error rates caused by distinct voice and pause patterns.

Developers can address these failure modes by bringing older adults and care partners directly into the development cycle through co-design workshops. Observing real-world interactions helps developers capture true voice pause patterns, test proactive error recovery prompts, and build interfaces that reduce daily user anxiety.

Explore the data repository of lived experience to see these themes in more depth around designing for older adults.

CARE PARTNER AS A CO-USER, NOT AN AFTERTHOUGHT

Building better AgeTech products by including care partners from the start

Family care partners are a large and growing population.

63 Million

Americans are care partners. That’s approximately 1 in 4 adults.

3 in 5

care partners are women.

Nearly 1 in 3

are caring for both children and aging parents.

Source: AARP & National Alliance for Caregiving. (2025). Prevalence of caregiving. Caregiving in the US 2025.

Use of remote monitoring devices among family care partners roughly doubled in five years, rising from 13 percent in 2020 to 25 percent in 2025, suggesting an immense opportunity to engage care partners through technology.

When thinking about an expanded market, especially if your business focuses on direct-to-consumer products, family member care partners often discover and buy products for older adults and play a role in the older adult’s care decision-making.

Being a care partner isn’t a single role. Design implications differ depending on who the care partner actually is.

Paid or unpaid

A professional home health aide and an unpaid adult child may need different levels of access to clinical information. Developers should intentionally design role-based permissions and data access that reflect the care partner’s relationship to the older adult and their responsibilities.

Focus on health or daily activity

A care partner managing medication and symptom tracking needs different information than one primarily supporting meals, transportation, and household tasks.

→ Asynchronous notification design. A care partner managing from a distance, which is common, cannot be expected to be watching a live dashboard. Notifications need to work as standalone, actionable messages that make sense without additional context.

→ Alert fatigue is a real risk. A care partner who receives frequent low-value alerts will start ignoring them all, including the ones that matter. Alert thresholds need to be tuned to genuinely actionable events.

→ Dashboard information hierarchy matters more than dashboard completeness. A care partner checking in for two minutes between other responsibilities needs the single most important fact immediately visible.

“It would be great for my parents for it to be super simple enough that they can also navigate and understand without me and my sister having to like step in every single time. And telling them where to go or what something means.”

– Care partner interviewed

The take-home message: Care partner usability is a driver of older adult adoption. When the care partners interface takes too much effort, care partners disengage, and the older adult often loses the daily reinforcement that keeps them using the product.

PRO TIP

Test for usability directly in real-world conditions

During usability testing, assess whether an older adult can complete onboarding and reach first successful use at the level of support (e.g., from a care partner, healthcare provider, your customer support team) that’s expected after implementation. This is distinct from general task completion because it tests whether the product is genuinely usable in the context where it will be adopted. If a product requires a care partner to consistently guide the older adult through basic use, the product has not solved the usability problem. It has simply shifted the burden to someone else.

CASE STUDY

Supporting safer aging in place of choice through ambient monitoring

Livindi demonstrates that successful home-based technology implementation depends on far more than accurate detection. By designing for care partner workflows, minimizing setup burden, protecting privacy, and creating everyday value beyond emergencies, the platform supported sustained adoption and more reliable use in real-world home environments.

Explore the data repository of lived experience to see these themes in more depth around designing for care partners.

Building fit-for-purpose AgeTech products & participatory design

Once you’ve defined your segment and its design implications, validate with real users from that segment. Use DiMe’s V3+ Framework usability validation resources to structure this testing across all potential users (older adults, care partners, healthcare providers).

Context matters as much as the interface

Engage community partners (e.g., older adult and care partner advocacy organizations, community health organizations, culturally specific organizations, etc.) directly to surface cultural considerations before finalizing design decisions.

Identify the common relationship dynamics between an older adult and a care partner for this specific product category. A recurring pattern in our research was the tension between an older adult’s desire for autonomy and a care partner’s desire for more oversight.

Prioritize the older adult’s agency in both the purchasing decision and the design process itself. To support aging in place of choice, products should aim to preserve older adults’ autonomy. A product designed exclusively for the purchaser, typically an adult child or institutional buyer, at the expense of the end user’s preferences will show up later as an adoption problem.

Affordability is a top reason that prevents older adults from using technology, ahead of usability concerns, according to DiMe’s survey data. If the product depends on out-of-pocket payment, the perceived benefit has to clearly outweigh the cost. If it does not, the more durable path is designing toward a payer, a health plan, Medicare, and/or Medicaid, and building the evidence base that ROI conversation requires, covered in the Reimbursement Pathway Navigator section.

“I would try anything as long as I get assistance financially to do so. Medicare is not going to pay for a [smartwatch]; that’s a luxury. I am currently living with an implanted heart monitor because of the Syncope. Medicare pays for that because it is medically necessary.”

– Older adult interviewed

Rural older adults face persistently lower broadband availability, lower device access, and lower technology adoption rates than their metropolitan peers, and lower income in rural areas compounds this further.
Broadband access alone does not close the gap. Digital literacy, comfort, and local technical support are separate barriers that expanding broadband access alone won’t immediately solve.
Older adults in rural areas have a lot to gain from remote monitoring and telehealth given limited local specialist availability.

If you’re designing for older adults in rural areas, consider design choices like cellular-first connectivity, offline functionality, in-person hybrid support, ongoing phone-based support, and/or collaborating with rural distribution partners such as Area Agencies on Aging.

Source: JAMIA Open

CASE STUDY

Building clinical trust in virtual cognitive rehabilitation

Moneta Health demonstrates that reimbursement alone does not establish clinical adoption. By collecting meaningful outcomes from the outset, using recognized evaluation frameworks, and communicating results in ways clinicians trust, Moneta built credibility with referring providers while expanding access to cognitive rehabilitation for older adults.

Next step

Explore the Data Repository of Lived Experience to identify key themes in what older adults and care partners value. Use these insights as a starting point for user research with your target users.

Go to Data Repository of Lived Experience