Therapist-centred design of NUI based therapies in a neurological care hospital

Abstract

Through a participatory design (PD) process with therapists at a neurological chronic care hospital that has no ICT based workflow processes we identified three main components where NUI technology can be deployed for physical therapy: patient stimulation, on-demand patient therapy tool control, and data logging and visualization. Based on our study, we created a scenario that encompasses these components for a specific physical therapy activity targeting head and torso movement for children suffering neurological disorders. The scenario includes a Kinect, large screen and mobile pervasive technologies controlling a game-like activity including data logging and visualization in a shared social intranet. Hospital staff liked the game-activity and logging, but expressed concerns about parallel use of technology. They also wanted to expand the use of the NUI technology in the therapy room leading to new scenarios that we are pursuing. We are using our participatory design process with therapists that are not tainted by the use of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to establish scenarios where NUI designs can provide access to ICT tools to help us develop better NUI design principles.

Increasing participation in the information society by people with disabilities and their families in lower-income countries using mainstream technologies

“…The GUI uses symbols on a screen (e.g. folders or icons) that can be selected using a mouse, whereas an interface that relies on direct interaction such as touch, motion or speech is considered to be the Natural User Interface (NUI) [44].…”

Integrating contexts in healthcare

“…By the end of this cycle, reports with interviews and observations, photos, movies, stories shading and creating scenarios were generated as artifacts. The research team involved in this first cycle reported their experiments and materials generated in dissertations and articles [1,3,6,4,5,7,8,10,11]. The second cycle of activities involved analysis of the collected requirements and their validation through interviews.…”

“…Several prototypes were developed, refined and validated. Researchers created prototypes for the areas of Education [11], Nursing Care [1,2] and Physiotherapy [5] and during the validation, some solutions of interaction design were proposed and the prototypes were re-evaluated. In the third cycle the designers proposed some evaluations and usability tests, thus, improving the prototypes or generating new ones, by considering user's skills and technological innovations.…”

Lessons from ICT design of a healthcare worker-centered system for a chronic mental care hospital

“…In these contexts, often the person being cared for only receives a quality of care that depends upon the quality of treatment and procedures of the care workers. Our research is looking at these healthcare workers by focusing on their complex workflows to design applications and systems to integrate into their existing natural collaborative practices [2,3], considering their cultural values that shapes their relationship.…”

“…The three main findings are: 1.Supporting worker social and professional behaviour based on communication and workflow using an online social intranet is effective, 2.Designing for cultural based values appropriation as well as adoption is important and 3.Public workflow visualization can influence worker behavior considering cultural values. We believe that working with these professionals is an opportunity to design information technology based workflow that avoids a Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers (WIMP) oriented strategy [3]. Likewise, we can use their workflow as a starting point in deciding what natural is for that cultural ecosystem, given that their workflow has evolved over more than two decades of practice [2].…”