Co-design the Acceptability of Wearables in the Healthcare Field

Nowadays, health is perceived as autonomy, both in the management and assessment of care processes. With Wearable Technology, tech companies and national health services move healthcare in everyday life to a better life. Wearables are already functionally high performing, but they still have acceptability and usability issues, especially in digital immigrants. Mobile health could contribute to patient empowerment in the digital health revolution if the human feels fulfilled by the new experience proposed. This paper presents a case study of co-design and co-evaluation applied to a wearable service system for monitoring and driving self-rehabilitation at home. The participatory approach has been used to investigate the complex relationship between technical and human factors. Rapid Prototyping allows for developing tangible tools as testing and communication one. The different users and stakeholders involved in the project used the prototypes as tangible interfaces to understand and share their needs. The goal of this iterative process of interaction and reflection is to design a quality user experience. This paper aims to show how design-driven methods and tools can effectively conduct Research-through-Design to increase the acceptability of wearable systems. The positive results of the usability tests during the Multimodal Wearable case study show that wearable systems' acceptability depends on the perceived user-friendliness, which is strictly connected to the co-design process.