Ask your competent? doctor EXACTLY WHEN you're going to get OPTIMAL 100% RECOVERY PROTOCOLS! And keep asking until they finally acknowledge they know nothing about that. There are NO valid excuses!
A Participatory Model for Cocreating Accessible Rehabilitation Technology for Stroke Survivors: User-Centered Design Approach
Abstract
Background:
Globally,
1 in 3 people live with health conditions that could be improved with
rehabilitation. Ideally, this is provided by trained professionals
delivering evidence-based dose, intensity, and content of rehabilitation
for optimal recovery. The widely acknowledged inability of global
health care providers to deliver recommended levels of rehabilitation
creates an opportunity for technological innovation. Design processes
that lack close consideration of users’ needs and budgets, however, mean
that many rehabilitation technologies are neither useful nor used. To
address this problem, our multidisciplinary research group have
established a cocreation center for rehabilitation technology that
places the end user at the center of the innovation process.(Well the end user in stroke will always want 100% recovery. Stroke researchers should be working on that, but obviously that is NOT what is occurring!)
Objective:
This
study aims to present the participatory cocreation model that has been
developed from our center and illustrate the approach with 2 cases
studies.
Methods:
The
model is built around user participation in an intensive rehabilitation
program (2-hour sessions, 2‐5 times per week, and 8-week duration),
supervised by qualified therapists but delivered exclusively through
commercial and prototype technology. This provides participants (chronic
stroke survivors with movement and/or speech disability) with a rich
experience of rehabilitation technology, enabling them to provide truly
informed feedback, as well as creating an observatory for the research
team. This process is supported by short-term focus groups for specific
product development and a longer-term advisory group to consider broader
issues of adoption and translation into everyday health care.
Results:
Our
model has been active for 3 years with 92 (92%) out of 100 participants
completing the program. Five new technologies have evolved from the
process with further ideas logged for future development. In addition,
it has led to a set of cocreated protocols for technology-enriched
rehabilitation, including recruitment, outcome measures, and
intervention structure, which has allowed us to replicate this approach
in an acute hospital ward.
Conclusions:
Suboptimal
rehabilitation limits recovery from health conditions. Technology
offers the potential support to increase access to recommended levels of
rehabilitation but needs to be designed to suit end users and not just
their impairment. Our cocreation model, built around participation in an
intensive, technology-based program, has produced new accessible
technology and demonstrated the feasibility of our overall approach to
providing the rehabilitation that people need, for as long as needed.
doi:10.2196/57227
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