Abstract:

In this time of health emergency, due to Covid-19, digital solutions (especially e-health's ones) have become crucial to deal with social isolation and ensure continuity of care. Product designers should have a first-line role in ensuring a positive patient experience.

Digital technologies, and particularly Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), might reshape human habits, including those concerning healthcare but, despite the wide range of medical products (e.g., telemedicine solutions) available on the market, there are several difficulties in their use, acceptance, and dissemination among users (especially when elderly). This could probably happen due to a lack of the so-called “human factor”, whereby some questions arise: could the designer bridge this gap and encourage users to use digital health solutions? Which role should he play to achieve it? Can a better design, that takes into consideration the Human Factor, makes a medical product more accessible, acceptable, pleasurable as well as easy to use? Can a teaching experience help future professionals to better deal with the challenges of the digital era in the field of healthcare?

Given the urgency and relevance of these issues, product design students were asked to develop innovative telemonitoring solutions using a co-design approach based on the involvement of the final users as well as doctors and other related actors. According to this teaching strategy, the students started by choosing a specific pathology and discovering the related problems in order to properly identify their goals, then they conducted user interviews and questionnaires both to doctors and patients to define a final concept. The multi-actor involvement has been carried out both in the user research stage and the design stage according to a multidisciplinary teaching approach that helped the students to learn how to work together with the users and other professionals to find the best way to integrate ICTs within health care products and services.

This paper presents the most interesting telemonitoring solutions developed by students as a result of cooperation between doctors, patients, and designers in the fields of chronic disease care systems, as well as a conclusive analysis of the role of designers in healthcare issues.

Keywords:

Medical design, design education, product aesthetics, user acceptability.