Challenges in participation: Users and their roles in the development of home-based Pervasive Healthcare applications

Participatory Design (PD) has a strong tradition in professional settings, including e.g. hospitals and nursing homes. As care and rehabilitation practices move, to a greater extent, out of the hospitals and into private homes a new take on PD is needed to facilitate design activities with patients or laypeople as the primary user groups and to design healthcare applications to be used primarily in the home. This paper discusses challenges and possibilities related to the design of home-based healthcare applications and especially the users' possibilities for participation in creative PD activities. Based upon ongoing design-work, related to home-based rehabilitation of elderly suffering from vestibular dysfunction (dizziness), this paper presents lessons learned and initial outcomes related to patient/citizen-focused development of healthcare solutions for private homes. We present initial ideas on how PD can be used to develop pervasive healthcare applications with less resourceful user-groups such as elderly people suffering from illness.