Design considerations for homecare products: towards the digital healthcare transition

Digital Healthcare is one of the goals of the Digital Transition. It includes the digitalisation of healthcare and the implementation of a widespread capillary network in which the patient's home becomes the core of care (telemedicine, de-hospitalization). However, the challenge lies in making this transformation – and so the new domestic medical devices – patient-friendly, easily accessible, and acceptable. Shifting some medical and care practices to the patient’s home requires redesigning medical devices to fulfil the broad needs of patients, family members and carers – as well as medical personnel, who monitor the patient remotely. This paper introduces some design considerations for the development of homecare products (telemedical devices to be used independently by users in their home environment). It opens by laying out the context from which these considerations were drawn (an educational experience: a full-semester workshop within the master’s degree in Product Design at the University Iuav of Venice, Italy) and then presents five design principles: simplicity of use, aesthetics and likeability, discretion, camouflaging, recreational (which are listed as fundamental and integrative principles of health product design) along with, where needed, references to a selection of student projects. The purpose of this paper is to emphasise that while designing healthcare devices the same attention paid to the technical function and its accuracy should also be paid to these five design principles because translating them into formal and functional aspects of the product will contribute to the final acceptance and adoption of the system by the user, hence to its success and effectiveness. Ultimately, promoting the digital health transition, the spread of telemedicine, and de-hospitalization. Finally, the article encourages the scientific community to identify new design principles in a field that needs design intervention more than ever before.