Web application for assisting on medication and information management of medical consultations for the elderly

Average life expectancy of the humans has been increasing with the advancement of medicine, hence observing an aging of the population in general. Associated with aging, loss of cognitive ability and memory failure are often observed, which can have a great impact on the quality of life and autonomy of people who need to take medication on an hourly basis. In this work, we present the development of an application that helps to manage two key issues for the quality of life of the elderly: the time of medication and the time of medical consultations. The application is managed (information is added, altered or deleted) by a responsible, as a family member or health professional. After analyzing several solutions, it was verified that the biggest problem identified is the difficulty of interaction with the interface (sometimes it presents a lot of information and do not focus on functions of immediate necessity). In this context, we present a solution that focuses on two main objectives: first, to present a clear and simple list of medication and list of information of consultations; and second, to provide a simplified interface for the management of medication by a caregiver (child, nurse, and tutor). In the first development phase, we evaluated the usability of this interface, with ten health care professionals, who evidenced the potentiality of the solution presented here.