A New Method for Structured Integration of User Needs in Two Health Technology Development Projects: Action Sheets

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.