- 期刊
- OpenAccess
An Age-related Cataract Vision-Simulated Platform for Elders
並列摘要
The population of aging people is increasing rapidly, making it vitally important to understand how to design products for the elderly. However, because of the significant difference between the ages of the young designers and the elderly they wish to serve, it is impossible for the designers to have firsthand knowledge of the physical problems they need to address, and this could result in low-quality designs of products for the elderly. This study focuses on a common, degenerative condition of the elderly, i.e., the formation of cataracts that diminish the ability to see clearly, by constructing an innovative platform that can simulate an elderly person’s vision as cataracts develop. This platform can help industrial designers by providing a guide for their use when developing the detailed design features of a product to assist the elderly with this issue. In this study, we used the knowledge of cataracts from the field of ophthalmology as a basis, and we utilized the image-processing technique of the Visual Basic language to simulate the effect of a cataract on the ability to see. In the research, a digital eye chart was constructed, and its accuracy was confirmed experimentally with a standard eye chart of outpatient services. The participants in the experiment were 15 patients who had age-related cataracts. Furthermore, in this study, we developed an age-related, cataract image-blurring program that can blur the digital eye chart for the second experiment that was concerned with the ability to recognize blurry images. The purpose of the second experiment was to decrease the visual acuity of young, healthy eyes (or visual acuity with correction up to 1.0) and to gather statistics for the recognition critical point. These statistics represent different degrees of visual degeneration (i.e., different degrees of blurriness), and they were used to construct the simulation function of visual acuity. Thus, the program is a product-design platform, the purpose of which is to provide industrial designers a tool that can be used to import the image produced by a model of a product and to evaluate the suitability of that product for elders with age-related cataracts. In the case verification, a digital, hanging clock was used as an example. The research results showed that, when an a patient’s visual acuity decreases to 0.4 and 0.3 due to an age-related cataract, the appropriate word heights of digital clock must be at least 140mm and 190mm, respectively.