E-textiles Assisting Healthcare, Rehabilitation, and Well-being - To whom, for What, and How?

Abstract

The use of e-textiles in healthcare, rehabilitation, and well-being (referred here as assistive e-textiles) is spreading for its obvious benefits, such as monitoring of physiological signals and vital signs. Although there are versatile studies on individual applications of assistive e-textiles, there are not many that include in the design process a wide variety of stakeholders who have roles in development or use of assistive technology. To provide stakeholder-oriented design knowledge regarding the development of assistive e-textiles, we organized five multidisciplinary ideation workshops for 50 participants with different backgrounds and roles. Many distinct ideas were created that targets a diverse set of users from different age groups, ability levels and even for non-human actors. Participants came up with ideas related to work environment, rehabilitation, healthcare, and daily life. This article presents those findings and discusses how those can help designers and researchers in the field.