Universal access in Health Telematics Some factors that influence the design of Health Telematics Services

摘要

This paper is concerned with the issue of end user acceptance of Health Telematics products and services from the perspective of universal access and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Specifically, the paper aims to correlate acceptance and benefit with detailed and thorough knowledge about the target users. Such knowledge may relate to individual user characteristics, preferences, literacy, point of access, as well as to the hardware, software and bandwidth. To cope with variation in the above set of user parameters means a strong commitment to universal access, which can be attained by inducing universal deign principles into user-centred design practices.