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AgeTech Prism™ reads technology products built for aging adults from their public footprint and publishes the result. The method is gerontology-led. The questions come from the study of aging, from the World Health Organization's account of human functioning, and from usability, accessibility, content design, and service design for the experience facet.
The Prism starts from the aging person. Every attribute it reads is a question about how a product treats the older adult: who the design is for, who decides, what the person can do with it, and what happens when it fails. The disciplines behind the questions are named on every attribute.
Every product is read through the same five facets, in the order a careful buyer walks through a house: who built it, what it is, who it is for, whether the person can use it, and whether the builder keeps to the code.
The World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning describes functioning as a person, their activities and participation, and the environment around them. Each facet is labeled with the component it corresponds to.
Who built it
Environmental factors
The organization behind the product, its grounding in the aging field, its evidence practice, and whether it can be held to account.
What it is
Environmental factors
The promise and the evidence offered for it, how the aging person is framed, what happens to data and AI, and what it costs.
Who it is for
The person
Who the product names as its beneficiary, the older adult's own way in, and the helper roles it depends on.
Whether the person can use it
Activities and participation
How the experience meets the aging adult where their capacity stands, read with the methods of usability, accessibility, content design, and service design.
Whether the builder keeps to the code
Environmental factors
Accessibility, privacy and consent, AI governance, health authorization where the claim requires it, and fair terms, read on a conformance scale and printed as a row beside the reading.
Twenty attributes are placed on one scale, Level 1 to Level 5. The scale describes who directs the relationship between the product and the older adult: at Level 1, others direct and the older adult is managed; at Level 5, the older adult directs and contributes. The four facet marks and the headline level are read from those placements, and the number beneath the level is the score out of 100.
Five conformance attributes are read on their own scale: Supports, Partially supports, Does not support, or Not applicable. They are printed as a row beside the reading, separate from the level. An unmet obligation can cap the level the product reaches.
Every placement rests on evidence rows: a verbatim quote from a stored public source, its locator, its URL, and its capture date. An absence in the public record is itself a fact and is stated as one. A placement with no evidence behind it is marked provisional, and when too many placements are provisional or undisclosed, the number is withheld and the reading publishes as a profile.
The worked example's illustrative profile.
The method is versioned and published. Every reading is pinned to the version it was made under, carries its provenance, and is open to feedback from vendors, buyers, and end users.