Consumer Electronics: What’s a Win for Seniors?

Consumer Electronics Week took over the Metropolitan Pavilion in NYC June 26 – 27, and Senior Planet was there, scoping out what’s new and searching for the products that best serve seniors, whether they’re designed for older users or for everyone.

The result: the first ever Senior Planet Best of CE Week Awards.

And the winners:

• A state-of-the-art digital hearing aid, the ReSound Linx
• A device that measures your muscle mass and BMI – great for helping you to counter the muscle wasting that comes with age; the Skulpt AIM
• A heart rate tracker that you wear like a watch – no chest straps! – PulseON
• Our editor’s award: fifty-three’s Paper and Pencil – iPad app and digital stylus for sketching, painting and more.

Click here to read about why we picked them and to find out about our runners-up.

With this new award, Senior Planet hopes to draw attention to the fact that, while so many consumer electronics products are designed with younger people in mind, seniors make up a large percentage of potential buyers. We hope our awards might serve as a nudge for companies to think more universally and design for all consumers – even those 60-plus – as well as to design better senior-specific products.

In our search for relevant and highly useable products, we looked for clear and simple interfaces (nobody needs clutter!), buttons that are large enough and widely spaced enough for our less precise finger control, font sizes that don’t make us reach for a magnifying glass, colors that read with enough contrast for older vision, and products that can make our lives easier, more streamlined, or more fun.

We presented the awards to the four winners on the CE Week stage.

What are your “bests” for seniors in the world of consumer electronics? And what do you wish designers and engineers would pay more attention to?