Sensors for healthcare: Would you want them in your home?

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges and approaches in designing inclusive sensor systems for home healthcare within the SPHERE project, emphasizing user understanding and effective communication among interdisciplinary teams.

Contribution

It highlights the dual challenge of understanding diverse users and translating user insights into technical specifications for home healthcare sensors.

Findings

Insights into user diversity for home healthcare sensors

Strategies for effective communication between designers and engineers

Emphasis on inclusive and desirable healthcare technology

Abstract

This paper describes some of the challenges set within SPHERE, a large-scale Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration that aims to develop sensor systems to monitor people's health and wellbeing in the home. In particular we discuss the dual task facing the User- Centered Design research group, to ensure the development of inclusive and desirable domestic healthcare technology. On the one hand, we seek to gain a rich understanding of the many envisaged users of the SPHERE system. On the other hand, for the user experience requirements to be translated into tangible outputs, it is crucial that we effectively communicate these findings to the broader team of SPHERE engineers and computer scientists.