Health and Welfare IT Product Design: Lessons Learned from a Design Class

In this paper we describe the outcomes from a university design class focused on the design of systems intended to solve problems faced by health care professionals, patients and systems that support welfare or extended independence for older people. The students worked in groups for 10 weeks finding a suitable problem to solve, iterating and refining their designs, evaluating prototypes with users, and finally presenting their work as a potential product with a detailed plan for how the product would be sold in the market. The primary contribution of this paper is to share innovative design ideas with the design community and to reflect on lessons learned by the students who, for the first time, were designing robust prototypes that solve real world problems.