Behavioral archetypes for stroke rehabilitation technologies

Abstract

Being a leading cause of death and serious long-term disability across the world, stroke and cerebrovascular diseases became a major burden on health and social care. However, research has shown that early therapy intervention with stroke patients has the potential for significant improvements in terms of cognitive and motor abilities. Integration of technology into rehabilitation such as the robot-assisted therapy, virtual reality applications, and telecare systems have changed the way rehabilitation programs are being delivered and it overcame some of the limitations and challenges that come with conventional therapy programs. Understanding the target audience and their behavior is of crucial importance to be considered in an early design phase especially with this kind of systems that have tedious nature and involve multiple groups of users (patients, therapists, and caregivers). In this study, we aim to adopt a participatory design approach that engages users and stakeholders in developing stroke rehabilitation technologies aligned with behavioral archetypes that are modeled around their behavioral perspectives. We believe that using archetypes in user research gives us a better view of behavior in interaction design of rehabilitation systems and provide developers with a model to validate interactive elements in stroke rehabilitation systems and user flows at a macro level. In this paper, a user study was designed to be conducted to validate behavioral archetypes of these groups through interviews and focus group sessions with different physicians, therapists and caregivers in rehabilitation centers.