The experience of living with stroke and using technology: opportunities to engage and co-design with end users

Abstract

Purpose: We drew on an interdisciplinary research design to examine stroke survivors’ experiences of living with stroke and with technology in order to provide technology developers with insight into values, thoughts and feelings of the potential users of a to-be-designed robotic technology for home-based rehabilitation of the hand and wrist. Method: Ten stroke survivors and their family carers were purposefully selected. On the first home visit, they were introduced to cultural probe. On the second visit, the content of the probe packs were used as prompt to conduct one-to-one interviews with them. The data generated was analysed using thematic analysis. A third home visit was conducted to evaluate the early prototype. Results: User requirements were categorised into their network of relationships, their attitude towards technology, their skills, their goals and motivations. The user requirements were used to envision the requirements of the system including providing feedback on performance, motivational aspects and usability of the system. Participants’ views on the system requirements were obtained during a participatory evaluation. Conclusion: This study showed that prior to the development of technology, it is important to engage with potential users to identify user requirements and subsequently envision system requirements based on users’ views.

Implications for Rehabilitation

• An understanding of how stroke survivors make sense of their experiences of living with stroke is needed to design home-based rehabilitation technologies.

• Linking stroke survivors’ goals, motivations, behaviour, feelings and attitude to user requirements prior to technology development has a significant impact on improving the design.

Keywords:

• Cultural probes
• experience-centred design
• home-based rehabilitation
• in-depth interviews
• robotic rehabilitation
• stroke rehabilitation
• user requirements

Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank all the participants who agreed to be involved in this study. We are thankful to SCRIPT consortium for their support.

Declaration of interest

This work has been partially funded under grant FP7-ICT-288698(SCRIPT) of the European Community Seventh Framework Programme. The authors report no conflicts of interest.