Creating personas for the body in digital health co-design
Personas are a design method involving the creation of character sketches of the types of people who may use a product or service, based on prior research. Personas typically represent an end-user’s demographic information, such as age, gender, education, and interests, as well as their typical habits. Having persona profiles to hand during the design process stimulates ideas and aids decision making. Traditional personas are text and image based, but how might this method be extended into a more physical form?
This workshop introduces the concept of personas, how they can be used as part of a co-design process, - and what it means for digital health technologies to consider the ‘bodily dimensions’ of personas. To illustrate this, the workshop will present an illustrative case study from a co-design team of researchers, roboticists, and occupational therapists, who created personas with physical dimensions to build a novel robot training mannequin for occupational therapy students created as part of the EPSRC Embodied Intelligence Programme grant. The tool was developed to help students develop their understanding of touch practices (identified as a training need by senior therapists) and prepare them for client-facing roles. Here, personas focused on expanding understandings of service users’ distinct bodily dimensions, e.g., potential movement capabilities, posture, reactions to touch, and what people’s bodies might be communicating about a condition or affective state. Each persona could be programmed into the robot, which would take on the persona’s physical qualities.
This workshop will include a mix of lecture style presentations, small group activities, and a Q & A with some of the team involved in the co-design study: a researcher, a roboticist, and a senior occupational therapist (Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement member). You will have an opportunity to co-design a persona for digital health focusing on bodily dimensions – and through doing so, understand the broader process of persona creation to apply in your own co-designed digital health project.
This workshop is for you if you are a UK-based health or care professional, manager, researcher, student, patient, family carer, or Small to Medium sized Enterprise using or (or interested in using) a co-design process and methods to develop a digital health technology. However, the workshop will be of particular relevance to healthcare practitioners, educators, and trainers whose work involves developing and/or using digital health training technologies in practices that involve the tactile interactions with the body (e.g., physiotherapists, nurses, podiatrists, care assistants). We also welcome researchers and roboticists working directly in the health sector who are interested in the topic. You can be at any stage of a project.
Facilitators: This workshop will be facilitated by Dr Minna Nygren, Research Fellow in Human Computer Interaction and Human Robot Interaction (University College London), Ruth Alecock, Senior Occupational Therapist (Oxfordshire County Council), and Postdoctoral researcher Dr Marco Pontin from Soft Robotics Lab (Oxford University) .
Support to attending events: For any access inquiries or requests, please contact codesignhub@kcl.ac.uk.
This event is free to attend.
About the Co-design support programme at the KHP Digital Health Hub: Co-design – the process of creating and developing a product or service in collaboration with all those involved in its use – can be a highly effective way to improve digital health and care, and business outcomes. This workshop is part of a programme of co-design support offerings at the EPSRC-funded King’s Health Partners Digital Health Hub, a multi-disciplinary centre helping those interested in developing a digital health innovation from conception to implementation. We are based at the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering.
If you would like to learn more about the co-design process and co-design methods and tools, please take a look at our open-access online Co-design for digital health course and Co-design methods and tools library. You can book a one to one with us here.
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Image credits. “Mona” Service user simulating touch aware robot for occupational therapy students’ training. Robotic platform by Marco Pontin, Perla Maiolino (University of Oxford). Image copyright: Perla Maiolino. https://embodiedintelligence.web.ox.ac.uk