Assessment of Elderly oriented assistive devices
Authors: Fan Xiaoli , Guo Hua , Wu Feng 
Published: June 2024

With the advancement of technology and the improvement of medical conditions, people around the world are living longer. Meanwhile, low fertility rates have reduced the proportion of young workers. These two factors together are driving the global trend of rapid population aging. The United Nations announced that the world's population has reached 8 billion on November 15, 2022, with 761 million people aged 65 and over, and this number will increase to 1.6 billion by 2050, with the population aged 80 and over growing faster. The global pension crisis is gradually entering the outbreak period, and the aging population makes countries all over the world face severe challenges of pension. In this context, countries around the world are trying to find strategies to cope with aging. China's 14th Five-Year Plan proposes to develop the silver economy and promote the vigorous development of the elderly products industry. At present, China's pension industry is still in its infancy, lack of perfect industry standards, market norms, evaluation systems and industry regulators, on the market for pension products and functions of many, fast update speed, some enterprises emphasis on publicity light research, products in the practical and safety aspects of the greater hidden dangers. Therefore, it is of great significance to actively carry out elderly-oriented assessment of elderly products. Based on the safety, usability and comfort of the products, this paper mainly focuses on the "elderly", concentrate on studying the physiological and psychological characteristics of the elderly, such as their perceptual ability, operational ability and cognitive ability, and establishes an elderly-oriented evaluation index system for assistive devices. This paper mainly focuses on the "elderly", revolves around the physical, physiological and psychological characteristics of the elderly such as the perception, operation and cognitive ability, and takes the safety, usability, comfort and affectivity as the purpose, and constructs a comprehensive, multi-level and multi-dimensional evaluation index system for the assistive devices for the elderly. The rollator was studied as a typical category of assistive devices for the elderly, and 6 corresponding products were randomly selected for the elderly-oriented assessment. By analyzing the functional characteristics and specific use situation of these rollators, the interaction process between the elderly and the rollators was analyzed, the typical task profile was extracted and the experimental task was designed. By screening 10 target elderly users for the usability test and user experience of the rollators, the interactive behavior and subjective experience results of the elderly in the process of using the product were collected and analyzed, based on which the elderly-oriented assessment of the product was studied effectively. Meanwhile the typical problems during the interaction were recorded and analyzed, based on which the optimization suggestions for the ergonomic design of the rollator category were suggested. The current research plays an important role in promoting the improvement of the quality of pension products and the optimization of service standards, which can effectively protect the personal health and safety of the elderly using pension products.