A Usable Mobile Islamic Calendar for Elderly Users

A Usable Mobile Islamic Calendar for Elderly Users

Fariza Hanis Abdul Razak, Nur Farhana Abdullah
Copyright: © 2016 |Pages: 15
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-9438-5.ch002
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Abstract

Calendar is a tool that tells us a date. While Gregorian calendars have been used worldwide, Hijrah calendar becomes a choice for Muslims. This Islamic calendar helps tells a user a date in Islam. Our previous study suggested that the Muslim elderly preferred to have Islamic mobile calendar. Despite abundance of Islamic mobile calendar applications, little was known whether any of them were usable for the elderly users. This study recommends a usable design of an Islamic mobile calendar for Muslim elderly users. To do this, a user test with five elderly participants was carried out and two existing Islamic calendars were used as probes. Later, two interfaces were produced and tested with our elderly participants. Based on the results and design principles, the interfaces of the Islamic mobile calendar have further been improved.
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Background

This section provides some work related to calendars for elderly, Islamic calendar and elderly & spirituality.

Calendars for Elderly

Recently, there have been efforts to design calendars for the use of elderly people. Some of these calendars are discussed here.

Neustaedte et al. (2007) designed a digital calendar that gets a family involved and connected. It is an inkable family calendar called LINC. LINC has features which are at-a-glance awareness, publicly visible, always on, simple and flexible interaction. Although LINC was developed for the use among family members, elderly and children can use it since it was accepted by these people.

Another interactive elderly calendar study was conducted by Descheneaux & Pigot (2009). To use the interactive calendar, users can just touch the screen to interact. This interactive calendar is a simple memory aid tool to remind users about appointments and medication. This calendar application can also help friends and family to keep in touch with the elderly as this application contains a camera to snap a picture.

Costa et al. (2010) developed an event scheduler for the elderly. It is called iGenda. iGenda functions as personal memory assistant. Consequently, iGenda has been put in hospitals to help the physicians and nurses to manage the aged patients. Additionally, the system was developed to run on mobile devices or personal computers. Patients felt that this system has helped them to keep track their daily activities (Costa et al., 2010).

Razak et al. (2013) designed a usable mobile calendar for the elderly which has features of reminders. This calendar is called Reminder for Elderly and has only a single button on the interface. This calendar was designed based on the design principles for the elderly and has been tested for the elderly usability. As a result, elderly participants felt satisfied with this calendar as they found it easy to use.

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