ICNR 2024 Workshop

To effectively design rehabilitative technology, it is crucial for stakeholders to understand the difficulties that patients experience and empathize with them. Active participation of patients in the development of rehabilitation technology can ensure the understanding of the complexities of their needs. Yet their involvement is often limited to the end of the process, such as usability testing. Stakeholders involved in the design process, including professionals from hospitals, universities, and industries, often underestimate the insights patients gain during their recovery journey in the interactions with different experts and technologies.

These are multidisciplinary experiences where patients not only learn about treatments and their own health but also develop opinions and expertise that go beyond the technical considerations and knowledge of their caregivers. Hence, their participation in each stage of the development process may significantly enhance transdisciplinary collaboration, leading to more inclusive and user-centered technology.

To address this gap, we, an international team of designers, engineers, and clinical personnel, conducted a Participatory Design Workshop, recognizing patients as experts involved throughout the co-creative design process. Participants worked in groups with former people who had a stroke and their relatives to identify specific needs. The workshop presented a design challenge related to daily-life functioning, such as grasping difficulties during grocery shopping, allowing participants to reflect on these challenges and prototype rehabilitative solutions to support motor training.

The workshop introduced co-creation methods, including personas, MoSCoW prioritization, and rapid prototyping, to demonstrate the benefits of participatory design. By engaging directly with patients, the workshop encouraged participants to adopt more user-centered design approaches in their future work, fostering greater inclusivity in rehabilitation technology development.

The hands-on workshop followed a structured approach based on the Double Diamond design framework, engaging workshop attendees in a collaborative process with (former and current) ABI patients and caregivers of the Hospital Los Madroños. Participants were divided into groups, and each group had to co-create a concept of a solution, such as an assistive or rehabilitative device, that would help the patient to solve a daily life challenge.

In the initial phase, the groups first got to know each other. They were provided each with a Data collection notebook summarizing the clinical needs and characteristics, as well as objectives, of an ABI patient. By doing so, they could start a conversation with caregivers to further explore, understand, and empathize with the patient's daily life challenges. Groups used the gathered information and insights to formulate questions for the patients. In the second part of the workshop, each ABI patient joined a group and started a conversation with their team members. This activity led first to defining a problem and a desired activity in which that problem occurs. Participants were then engaged in a Journey map exercise. This exercise aimed at mapping together the steps patients need to take to address the desired goal (e.g., reaching and grasping objects from a kitchen cabinet) and, for each step, describing their experience and identifying the main pain points or challenges. In the final part of the workshop, groups picked one of the raised pain points or challenges from the Journey map exercise and conceptualized a solution, by drawing it.  

This hands-on approach ensures that rehabilitation technology development remains user-centered, fostering solutions that are both practical and meaningful.

As researchers ourselves, we are interested in the interactions between workshop participants and aim to collect data during the workshop in the form of questionnaires, audio recordings, and photographic material during the hands-on workshop. Before any data is collected, we will ask for your informed consent. Following the GDPR and the ethical committees of both universities, we will handle your data with the utmost care, anonymizing it as much as possible. If you do not wish to have your data recorded, we will have a designated spot for you, so you do not have to miss out on joining us for this workshop!

Research at the Motor Learning and NeuroRehabilitation Lab
by Laura Marchal Crespo (TU Delft, Erasmus MC | Associate Professor)

Co-creating Immersive Virtual Neurorehabilitation Environments: a Participatory Design Workshop
by Salvatore Luca Cucinella (TU Delft, Erasmus MC, Rijndam Revalidatie | PhD candidate)

Development and validation of a survey tool for rehabilitation technology adoption - preliminary findings
by Courtney Celian (Shirley Ryan AbilityLab | Project Manager of the Robotics Lab)

Ankle-Foot Orthoses Design Shortcomings: User Complaint Survey
by Lennart Zielstra (Zeal Mobility Devices | CEO)

Panel Discussion: Co-creating with patients: does it really matter?
by Irene L. Y. Beck,  José López Sánchez, Courtney Celian, Salvatore Luca Cucinella, Lennart Zielstra, and Katherine L. Poggensee