https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1148-7470
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ABSTRACT
An early integration of users and stakeholders is needed for a successful innovation process. Nonetheless, the integration of users is often hard to realize – especially when dealing with persons with chronic diseases. In addition, patients or users in general often are not able to formulate the requirements in a technical manner. Therefore, even if user requirements are collected, it is not certain that the developers know or understand ‘what is really wanted’. To overcome these ‘gaps’, we have developed so-called Action Sheets (AS). This article presents the use of AS in two projects: the development of health technologies for people with cancer (INFOPAT) and dementia (QuartrBack). Depending on the project context, group sessions were conducted with different stakeholders to identify the needs of (potential) users. Within the INFOPAT project, ten focus groups were conducted with patients, physicians and other healthcare professionals. In QuartrBack stakeholders like e.g. care professionals, technical assistance organizations and citizens participated in two focus groups and three world cafés. Their requirements were then ‘fed’ into the technology development by the use of AS. AS appear to be a promising tool to make user needs based on social values more tangible and implementable into technology development processes. In addition, it shows up that four phases seem to be necessary for transferring identified user and stakeholder needs into AS, which can therefore be seen as essential to translate non-technically formulated requirements into technically feasible ones. The case study shows as lessons learned that despite the successful integration of user needs, context-sensitive adjustments are still necessary.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the entire consortia of the projects INFOPAT and QuartrBack in which the results presented here were gathered. At QuartrBack, special thanks are due to Johannes Hirsch for his dedicated commitment. Above all, we would like to thank the citizens, patients and other participants for their commitment in the projects. Without them, transdisciplinary research would not have been possible; everyone has therefore made a decisive contribution to the success of the project to date. Thanks also go to the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for promoting our research and innovation.
Conflicts of interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.
Protection of human subjects
The studies were performed in compliance with the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki on Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects, and were reviewed by the Ethics Committee at the German Society for Care Science and the Ethics Committee of the University Hospital Heidelberg (S-497-2012).
Notes
1 Scrum is used for agile development projects and systemizes the development process by applying special roles and methods. So called sprint phases subdivide the whole development process into short periods that should end up with a functioning intermediate product. The whole process is monitored and discussed closely within different periodical meetings such as sprint planning or review.
2 We did not collect or use existing data on cognitive status (e.g. the MMSE or similar), because the cognitive status was not decisive for participation.in the project (QuartrBack). All people with dementia should be involved as long as they could give their informed consent. Due to the effects of dementia, in the end only people in the early to middle stages were interested in participating in the project. However, this selection was not a methodological limitation of the people involved.
3 While no people with dementia explicitly participated in the workshops, the project did include people with mild to moderate dementia as well as their informal caregivers in two ways: 1) through the participation of a person with dementia and his wife in an expert advisory board, acting as representatives of the targeted user group. 2) Through the involvement of a small group of people with dementia as well as their informal caregivers in the field tests carried out toward the end of the project period. People with dementia were involved in this later phase of the project with an already mature technology prototype in order to avoid frustrations caused by technical failures etc. However, interviews were conducted with people living with dementia before and after the test phase with regard to the requirements of the technology and usability (user design).
4 The four leading questions were:
1. What basic conditions must be fulfilled for me to become a helper?
2. How must the ideal helper network be designed for me as a potential user?
3 What do I expect from the technology as a potential user? What do I fear?
4 What possibilities must the helper app offer me (as a helper)?
5 These included ensuring general functionality (1), cleanability (2) ease of use of the device (“easy to carry”) (3), usage of the correct data (4), including an energy-saving mode for indoors (5) and planning extrinsic and intrinsic motivation mechanisms (6).
6 For more details, see Kunz et al. (2016).Citation31