Towards co-design of rehabilitation technologies: a collaborative approach to prioritize usability issues

Area of Science:

• Rehabilitation Engineering
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Health Technology Development

Background:

• Early stakeholder engagement is crucial for successful rehabilitation technology development.
• Usability testing with end-users identifies critical issues.
• Prioritizing these issues often overlooks diverse stakeholder expertise.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a novel method for prioritizing end-user feedback using transdisciplinary stakeholder consultation.
• To integrate this feedback into subsequent product development for rehabilitation technologies.
• To demonstrate the method's application in developing neural recovery technology for spinal cord injury.

Main Methods:

• Collected feedback from five individuals with spinal cord injury using a think-aloud and semi-structured interview protocol.
• Extracted usability issues and rated them based on significance, feasibility, and priority by stakeholders.
• Aggregated issues to facilitate solution generation and mapped them to the product roadmap.

Main Results:

• Identified and rated 60 usability issues across nine facets.
• 80% of issues were of moderate to high significance, and 75% were addressable with existing resources.
• 50% of issues were rated as high priority for implementation, leading to 21 actionable tasks.

Conclusions:

• The developed method enables meaningful transdisciplinary stakeholder engagement in rehabilitation technology development.
• This approach can be extended to other projects for co-developing rehabilitation technologies.
• Practical considerations are offered for implementing this method in future endeavors.