Abstract Background Digital mental health interactive products have gradually become important tools for emotion regulation, psychological state monitoring, and auxiliary intervention for mental disorders. These products demonstrate advantages of low cost, sustainability, and high accessibility in long-term follow-up and non-pharmacological intervention for populations related to schizophrenia. However, substantial differences exist among users of different age groups in information processing ability, interaction familiarity, emotional feedback sensitivity, and technology acceptance. These differences directly affect product usability, emotional intervention effectiveness, and user adherence. Existing studies primarily evaluate interaction experience from an overall user perspective and lack quantitative comparative analyses across age groups. Therefore, this study analyzed the differences in experience of interactive mental health products among users of different age groups and proposed corresponding adaptation design strategies in order to promote the refined application of interactive mental health products in schizophrenia-related application scenarios. Methods A deployed mental health interactive product was selected as the research platform. A comparative experimental design based on age groups was adopted, recruiting a total of 126 participants divided into three groups aged 18-29 years, 30-44 years, and 45-60 years. All participants completed three types of tasks under a unified experimental environment, including emotion self-assessment, cognitive training, and emotion feedback interaction. Objective interaction indicators, including task completion time, click path length, misoperation rate, and functional module usage frequency, were automatically recorded by the system. In addition, standardized user experience questionnaires and emotion self-assessment scales were used to quantitatively evaluate subjective satisfaction, emotional stability, and changes in psychological comfort. One-way analysis of variance was applied to examine significant differences among age groups, followed by post hoc tests to further identify the sources of differences. Results The results showed significant differences among age groups in interaction efficiency, operational accuracy, and emotional improvement outcomes with p.05. Users aged 18-29 years demonstrated the highest task completion efficiency, with an average completion time of 2.84 ± 0.63 min and deeper functional exploration, but exhibited a relatively limited improvement in emotional scores of only 12.47%. Users aged 30-44 years achieved the best performance in functional completeness and interaction stability, with the lowest misoperation rate and an overall satisfaction score of 4.31 ± 0.52. Users aged 45-60 had the highest rate of misoperation under the initial conditions, but after reducing the interaction level and strengthening visual cues, their emotional stability score improved by 18.36% compared to the initial level. Discussion The findings indicate that mental health interactive products in schizophrenia-related applications should not adopt a single design paradigm but instead implement stratified adaptive strategies based on age differences. Younger users are more suited to interaction designs with immersive scenarios and immediate feedback mechanisms to enhance engagement. Middle-aged users place greater emphasis on logical functional structure and information clarity, while older users benefit from reduced operational steps and enhanced interface readability and feedback intuitiveness. By integrating objective interaction data with subjective emotional assessments, this study provides empirical evidence for age-adaptive design of mental health interactive products and offers practical value for optimizing and promoting digital tools for auxiliary intervention in schizophrenia. Future studies will further incorporate patients with schizophrenia and high-risk populations to validate the stability and generalizability of age-adaptive interaction strategies in real clinical and home-based intervention settings.
Xu Li (Sun,) studied this question.