Abstract
Prior research shows that involving children in the development of technology is valuable, though challenging. Involving child-patients may come with additional difficulties, but as technology is gaining importance in (pediatric) care, it is important to uncover these difficulties. This paper identifies the difficulties of involving child-patients in the development of technology. We do so by reflecting on a project at the Sophia Children’s Hospital, where we involved 17 children (of which 12 child-patients) in developing a mobile application for their participation in pediatric brain care. Our identified challenges are related to the recruitment of child-patients and the need to adapt the organization and content of our design research set-up, based on who we were able to recruit and how we recruited them. By identifying these challenges, we make designers and researchers aware of issues that may arise when involving child-patients in technology development and present guidelines to deal with them.
Keywords
healthcare technology; design research; child involvement; challenges
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.522
Citation
Verkijk, C., Tabeau, K., Ahaus, K., Gielen, M., de Wit, M., and van Veelen-Vincent, M. (2024) The challenges of involving child-patients in the development of a mobile application for their participation in pediatric brain care, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.522
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
The challenges of involving child-patients in the development of a mobile application for their participation in pediatric brain care
Prior research shows that involving children in the development of technology is valuable, though challenging. Involving child-patients may come with additional difficulties, but as technology is gaining importance in (pediatric) care, it is important to uncover these difficulties. This paper identifies the difficulties of involving child-patients in the development of technology. We do so by reflecting on a project at the Sophia Children’s Hospital, where we involved 17 children (of which 12 child-patients) in developing a mobile application for their participation in pediatric brain care. Our identified challenges are related to the recruitment of child-patients and the need to adapt the organization and content of our design research set-up, based on who we were able to recruit and how we recruited them. By identifying these challenges, we make designers and researchers aware of issues that may arise when involving child-patients in technology development and present guidelines to deal with them.