Wear-to-Care. Co-designing the Next Wave of Open Wearables in the Healthcare Sector

The paper explores the topic of design, materialization, and release of open source wearables that can increase awareness about the mental, behavioral and physical conditions of people with health impairments. The first part, which is based on a literature review, investigates the design of healthcare wearables connected to the emerging phenomena of open and user innovation. The second part describes the whole process of design and materialization of DermAware, an open-source “experiential” wearable developed within the project Distributed Design Market Platform (Creative Europe Programme) and specifically conceived to increase the social awareness on a pathology such as Atopic Dermatitis. The final part defines an operational framework to design open-source wearables, evidencing the process - from design to materialization – and the main critical aspects and opportunities related to the development of “experiential” devices. The conclusions of the paper identify a possible field for designing healthcare wearables called “Wear-to-Care”.