Therapist-centred design of NUI based therapies in a neurological care hospital

Abstract

Through a participatory design (PD) process with therapists at a neurological chronic care hospital that has no ICT based workflow processes we identified three main components where NUI technology can be deployed for physical therapy: patient stimulation, on-demand patient therapy tool control, and data logging and visualization. Based on our study, we created a scenario that encompasses these components for a specific physical therapy activity targeting head and torso movement for children suffering neurological disorders. The scenario includes a Kinect, large screen and mobile pervasive technologies controlling a game-like activity including data logging and visualization in a shared social intranet. Hospital staff liked the game-activity and logging, but expressed concerns about parallel use of technology. They also wanted to expand the use of the NUI technology in the therapy room leading to new scenarios that we are pursuing. We are using our participatory design process with therapists that are not tainted by the use of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to establish scenarios where NUI designs can provide access to ICT tools to help us develop better NUI design principles.