A semantic shift is happening in the health
industry. Healthcare is moving ever more towards home recovery and care, while
time spent at hospital keeps reducing. This is beneficial for patients with
faster recovery times and for the health industry through reduced costs. Home
healthcare means that medical devices that assist people to look after
themselves now need to establish an appropriate communication loop with the
patient. There is no longer a focus on the medical device communicating with
the medical practitioner through mainly only denotation of meaning. We suggest
that the new communication loop implies that the medical device can sense
information from the patient’s body, it can react to the data gathered and it
can communicate back to the patient through denotation and connotation of meaning:
making the information relevant for people’s everyday lives, addressing
pragmatic and hedonic aspects, and not only through the display of data. This
paper analyses a number of medical devices for home healthcare. We suggest a
set of criteria that designers can use when designing smart interactions for empowering patients to take care of their
health. We present a number of designs from the School of Design, Victoria
University of Wellington and assess them according to our suggested criteria.
Design and semantics of form and movement DeSForM 2013
