A design-led research approach to contextual evaluation of socio-psychological factors in the development of telehealth devices

Abstract

Well-designed medical devices that embrace the socio-psychological needs of patients lead to increased customer acceptance, sustained use, improved safety and cost-effectiveness for both the professional and lay users. This paper proposes a new iterative design-led research approach for collecting and evaluating socio-psychological contextual user experience of patients and care providers in the telehealth development process. This approach, which has been applied to a multi-country development of a medical device, is based around the usage of a telehealth prototype from early stages of the design process. This allows for 'mini' elements of all design stages to be addressed in each individual stage to ensure the capture of contextual data from users about usage patterns, feelings and impact on the patient-clinician care relationship. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.