Alternative log in & authentication methods (for elderly people)

Question

I'm designing a simple web app for some elderly family members, 1 of whom has Alzheimer's. The end goal is to provide them each with a tablet (probably Android but irrelevant for this problem) that would be stripped down to ideally 1 bookmark on the home screen which opens my web app.

What I am looking for are ideas on how to identify the user without the conventional username/password methods. With their condition I know that remembering an username is going to be almost impossible, let alone a password. Ideally I would recognize the device and relate that to a specific user.

There will be other users on the app that access it through normal methods (username+password on PC/mobile/tablet), which I'm handling with Zend_Auth. It's just these 2 users who I am concerned about identifying.

Security isn't a huge concern as the data will not be sensitive in any way, but I still need to differentiate between users.

I am building this in php with Zend Framework. I'm really looking for more ideas than specific code, although anything based in php or javascript would be great. Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your help

Answer 1

These advice are only valuable if security is not an issue :

• On the bookmarks page, insert a token in the link, which you will use to authenticate the users.
• if you can, check in the background for IP/user agent (if there is only one device that needs this simplified auth process, and assuming it's connection uses a fixed IP address)

And a simple idea if you have multiple users using the same device :

• on your bookmark page, put a picture of each user
• make it clickable, with the token discussed above in the href of the link.

That's simple to implement and easy to remember.

Hope that helps !