Geriatric Helper: An mHealth Application to Support Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment

• Main Authors: Samuel Silva, Rafael Felgueiras, Ilídio C. Oliveira
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-04-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: mHealth; comprehensive geriatric assessment; user centred design
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/18/4/1285

The Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) is a multidisciplinary diagnosis approach that considers several dimensions of fragility in older adults to develop an individualized plan to improve their overall health. Despite the evidence of its positive impact, CGA is still applied by a reduced number of professionals in geriatric care in many countries, mostly using a paper-based approach. In this context, we collaborate with clinicians to bring CGA to the attention of more healthcare professionals and to enable its easier application in clinical settings by proposing a mobile application, Geriatric Helper, to act as a pocket guide that is easy to update remotely with up-to-date information, and that acts as a tool for conducting CGA. This approach reduces the time spent on retrieving the scales documentation, the overhead of calculating the results, and works as a source of information for non-specialists. Geriatric Helper is a tool for the health professionals developed considering an iterative, User-Centred Design approach, with extensive contributions from a broad set of users including domain experts, resulting in a highly usable and accepted system. Geriatric Helper is currently being tested in Portuguese healthcare units allowing for any clinician to apply the otherwise experts-limited geriatric assessment.