Designing with Humans in the Loop: A Human-Centered Approach to AI-Based Healthcare Technologies

Artificial intelligence (AI) is considered to have great potential to support healthcare by improving diagnostic accuracy, optimizing workflows, and personalizing care. Yet, many AI-driven technologies fail to achieve envisioned impact due to issues such as algorithmic bias, poor data quality, and misalignment with clinical workflows and user needs. In practice, current AI development often prioritize technical performance over human and contextual factors, contributing to limited adoption. Human-Centered Design (HCD) offers a structured approach to align technology with end-user needs, improving usability, safety, and acceptance. Building on these principles, the Human-Centered AI (HCAI) paradigm has sought to ensure human control for advanced automation by creating systems that are transparent, interpretable, and trustworthy. However, the HCAI paradigm lacks a clearly defined development Human Centered Design process for the AI-based health technology that is suited to data-driven AI development. This paper therefore proposes an Integrative HCAI-based health technology Design approach (HCAID) that bridges HCD processes with AI model Development to guide the development of effective, human-centered AI-based healthcare technologies.