Starting from the needs: what are the appropriate sources to co-create innovative solutions for persons with disabilities?

Abstract

Purpose

Technical solutions could facilitate activities and participation in individuals with disabilities. For the development of solutions, hackathons are a method of interdisciplinary collaboration. For hackathon, the definition of pain points that require solutions is crucial. We aimed to determine engineers’ preferences and expectations regarding pain point qualities.

Methods

We used a collaborative approach involving individuals with disability, families, and healthcare professionals to determine pain points for use by engineering students during a disability Hackathon. A pain point bank was built using 3 upstream sources: a survey (350 responses, 20 pain points selected), interviews (8 children, 13 pain points), and a multidisciplinary workshop based on design thinking methods (45 people, 32 pain points). A fourth source was 20 adults with disabilities present during the Hackathon. Engineering students rated pain point qualities from each source in a questionnaire that included closed questions relating to predefined criteria: achievability, specificity, relevance and attractiveness and open questions to collect non-predefined quality criteria.

Results

Pain points from the workshop were most frequently used (48%); followed by on-site discussions with mentors (43%), the survey (38%), and interviews (31%). On-site discussions received the highest quality ratings followed by the workshop, survey, and interviews. Three quality criteria emerged from the responses to open questions: “representative”, “empathy”, and “real-need”.

Conclusions

To be actionable by engineers, pain points must relate to real needs, be achievable, specific, relevant and attractive but also representative and arouse empathy. We devised a checklist of qualities along with a toolbox of methods to achieve each.

Implications For Rehabilitation

• The first step of the development of technical solutions for children and individuals with disabilities is the identification of their needs and their adequate formulation to be submitted to technical solutions providers.

• Daily life needs of individuals with disability were gathered for an engineering hackathon and proposed as pain points to 400 engineering students.

• To facilitate the development of solutions by engineers, pain points must relate to real needs, be specific, relevant, achievable and attractive; be representative and arouse empathy; a toolbox of needs collection methods is proposed to achieve each of those qualities.

• Discussions with individuals with disability and health professionals should be provided.

Keywords:

• Innovation
• daily life
• disability
• technical solutions
• hackathon
• multidisciplinary

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the people who completed and circulated the survey. The authors also thank the participants in the discussion group, the interviews, the multidisciplinary workshop and the Hackathon. The authors thank Bernard Kerdraon, Madame Larby and the occupational therapists of Ty Yann (among others Carole Le Nadant) for their review of the survey. The authors thank the General Management Committee of the EACD and the EACD 2019 organizing and scientific committees. The authors thank Kathy Malas for her advice regarding the Hackathon organization. The authors also thank Johanna Robertson for language assistance and Damien Pons for the figure design.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.