Participatory interaction design for the healthcare service field

Abstract

Innovative service operations in the healthcare field should be cooperative and proactive. However, this is often difficult because separate providers have different ideas and backgrounds and little information of others' practices. For example, we found that workers in a care facility share one notebook for communication and have no incentive to improve the workflow. We also observed that most point-of-care system PDAs in a hospital were not being used to record and share information by the nurses, mainly because the system interface impeded their workflow. In addition, members of a dance sports circle, who want to improve their health, are inactive because of a lack of support. Such healthcare communities should be encouraged to be proactive and collaborate in solving problems. Participatory interaction design is important for this purpose, and so an activity methodology combined with technical systems should be developed. This paper proposes three steps towards participatory interaction design and describes a prototype of the methodology. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.