A preliminary experiment to investigate the effects of blue backgrounds on a tablet screen for elderly people

A tablet computer is considered as a useful tool for elderly people to improve their everyday life and even to have training to enhance their cognitive ability. In this study, the authors conducted a preliminary experiment to see how different background colors of a tablet computer screen can affect the attention of elderly people while they are performing a task on the tablet computer. Ten Japanese subjects over sixty-five years old performed circle-counting tasks on a tablet computer screen with white, blue and light blue backgrounds. For these three background colors, three different symbols including circles were presented in black, and the subjects were directed to count the number of circles in a short period of time. The average percentages of correct answers for the circle-counting tasks that the subjects performed were higher with the blue and light blue backgrounds than with the white background. These results suggest that white color may not be the best choice for a background color of a tablet computer screen for elderly people.