Left side navigation tablet/mobile app

I have a task to build app for elderly people(Users). I work in a med tech company therefore my users are often very sick.

App will be distributed on our own tablet devices and there will be limited use of smartphones.

This is the blockout of the app. Red is content. Navigation is at the bottom. Top bar is above the white line on top. As You can see there is the green color on sides, It is basically free/unused space.enter image description here

Because I wanted to use free space to get my content little bit bigger(Bigger fonts and icons) I wanted to eliminate free space/green space.

For that I moved navigation from bottom to the left. Like this.

enter image description here

This allowed me to increase the size of the content.

My question is: Do you have experiences with left navigations on tablet in terms of UX. Is this something that can work or should I avoid it? What are your thoughts guys ?

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