ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses older people's characteristics and design requests to accommodate their needs in order to ensure efficient, safe, and comfortable human–machine interactions. New technologies (NT) can create increased difficulties to older people resulting from the lack of previous experience and poor usability regarding age-related characteristics. New technologies can be used to empower older adults in the performance of common daily tasks, compensating for age-related sensory, physical, psychomotor, and cognitive limitations. The effect of age in human–machine interactions should lead designers and engineers to a greater concern on the technologies design. The demographic projections, together with the effects of the ageing process and the increased variability among older people, as well as different contexts of NT use, complete the approaches to be considered when analyzing the effect of age in human–machine systems. Human variability is the range of possible values for any measurable characteristic, physical or mental, of human beings.
