Designing user interfaces for elderly: A case study in applicability of thin vs. fat clients

One common approach in dealing with increased number of elderly is provisioning of IT based applications that strive to prolong their independent life. However, development of such applications is cumbersome and expensive. In order to simplify and ease the development of such applications, MPOWER framework has been developed. The MPOWER framework provides service based architecture and a set of predefined services that can be assembled into applications for elderly. In this article we give a brief overview of the MPOWER framework and concentrate on the issue of providing usable interfaces for the elderly. Specifically, we compare two versions of an application for the elderly, one using a thin and other a fat client. We demonstrate that although thin clients are simpler to develop, in many situations fat clients should be used as they can provide interfaces that are better accustomed to the elderly.