Abstract
Many studies have shown that individuals experience more communication difficulties as they age, and that older adults rely on the visual modality to compensate for these difficulties. Therefore, the addition of a visual channel to a pre-existing audio channel could mitigate some of the communication difficulties experienced by older adults. Currently, the use of this video-mediated communication can be found in telemedicine settings. This research was designed to investigate the potential benefits of visual information for younger and older adults when performing an instruction following task in a telemedicine setting. The task was to load a medication organizer. The dependent variables were the time to complete the task, the accuracy of performance, memory for the medication regimen, and subjective mental workload. Results revealed benefits for the video channel in both age groups. However, the benefits were evident only for memory and workload measures, not for task performance. This study is an important contributor to psychological and telemedicine research because it operationalized the construct of environmental support and helped to specify the tasks that can be done using telemedicine technology.
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