The Design Process of an mHealth Technology: The Communicative Constitution of Patient Engagement Through a Participatory Design Workshop

Abstract

The aim of this article is to allow for a better understanding of how patient engagement is progressively constituted through interactions during a participatory design workshop. We will present a research project (based on a Participatory Design Approach) with the objective of creating an mHealth technology to encourage post-myocardial infarction (MI) patients to manage their condition, and learn more about their sudden cardiac death risk. The analysis will allow us to reveal the communicative constitution of patient engagement during the design process. We will illustrate patient engagement “in-the-making” by revealing 3 interactional processes: (1) the collective constitution of “experiential knowledge”, (2) the enaction of a “mutual learning space”, and (3) the co-creation of a prototype that embedded the patients’ voices.

Keywords

• health technology
• mHealth
• participatory design
• dialogical space