ICT-based health information services for elderly people: past experiences, current trends, and future strategies

Although health information is readily available on the Internet and has changed the way people deal with their health in many ways, the retrieval of relevant information remains problematic, especially for elderly people. With a focus on elderly people, this paper summarizes current trends in consumer health informatics, discusses past and present initiatives providing health-information services, and proposes a future strategy for the design of sustainable services. A systematic literature review and a review of past German and EU projects concerned with health information services for elderly people are given. Many publications focus on health information services for specific diseases and on their quality and semantic accessibility, yet few deal with presenting and customizing health information for elderly and disabled people. Past experiences from Germany suggest that very often the specific needs of this target group are not met, and therefore accessibility remains largely hypothetical. We propose a strategy with five key points for the design of sustainable health-information services for elderly people. More research is needed to customize web-based health information services to the needs of the user group that needs them most urgently - elderly and disabled people.