Inclusive Design Thinking for the Development of Digital Health Applications: A Methodology Review

Inclusive Design Thinking (IDT) is an approach that specifically addresses disadvantaged user groups and involves them in the innovation process. In recent years, IDT has emerged as a particularly promising approach for increasing citizen and patient engagement in the development of digital health applications. Although IDT is based on existing frameworks of design thinking and human-centered design approaches, there is still no overview of its methods for digital health solutions. Our aim was to develop such a systematic overview of the methods used, aligned with the design process, and thereby facilitate the practical application of IDT. 44 IDT methods could have been consolidated and assigned to the phases of the IDT process. This work provides the first systematic overview of IDT methods used for Digital Health (DH). Future work could expand on this and, for example, investigate the effectiveness of the methods in more detail.