Assistive technology has great potential to help individuals living with chronic health conditions, however devices often fail to align with the unique requirements of users. These results in device abandonment and missed opportunities to benefit people. This exploratory study aims to evaluate the short and longer-term satisfaction, psychological benefit, use and resources involved in co-designed customised assistive devices within a current healthcare service. Individuals with chronic health conditions identified daily living challenges. Eleven individuals completed the trial and were involved throughout the design process. Outcome measures evaluated the impact of the devices provided, healthcare utilisation, help required, and resources used. Nineteen custom assistive devices were produced for twenty-four challenges in daily living identified. At 3-months, eighteen devices were still being used. Daily challenges had become easier for individuals to complete and required less help from informal carers. Individuals were satisfied with the devices and service provided. Improvements in competence, adaptability and self-esteem were sustained long-term. The average clinician's time required to produce a device was 5 h 55 min, with an average cost of £203.79. People with chronic conditions were able to benefit from the co-design process resulting in satisfaction and long-term utilisation of the device, and positive psycho-social benefits. The costs associated with embedding this approach in a healthcare service were calculated. Scaling up the co-design process reduced the associated costs per device compared to previous work. Further work is required to evaluate co-designing across larger samples and explore opportunities to further improve the cost-efficiency.
Keywords: Custom assistive devices; aids-of-daily living; co-design; rehabilitation engineering; user involvement.
By involving users in the design process, healthcare professionals can create devices that better meet users’ expectations, preferences and functional needs, thereby increasing overall usability, satisfaction and utilisation long-term of the devices.Incorporating the individual’s perspective and needs into the design process enabled users to better understand the solutions that could be produced and thus encouraged users to identify other challenges in daily living they faced where an assistive device could assist them.Through being provided with devices to support them with specific challenges they faced, individuals were able to perform more tasks independently, reducing the need for help from family members and informal carers for the associated tasks.Re-evaluating the solutions generated with other previous research may help identify common design solutions and features to enable further scaling-up of this co-design approach.