Abstract:

Although today's clinical healthcare domain is typically driven by technological possibilities, increasingly awareness is building that a change in focus is needed to also incorporate the experiences of those who undergo a treatment or provide it. There is a growing demand for more human-focused care and solutions.In order to anticipate this growing demand and design innovative and human-focused clinical healthcare solutions, it is essential to understand the needs, values and experiences of patients, their loved ones and clinical teams throughout the care cycle. This means focusing on people rather than technology or disease, and more specifically placing the patient at the centre of the experience instead of their disease condition. Taking the patient as starting point reveals a unique set of research questions, a different set of priorities in understanding the care process and a new and revealing layer of information relating to patient healthcare experience.This paper describes a qualitative and co-creative people research approach that underpins the Philips Design Ambient Experience Research Program. Through developing new qualitative research methods and tools, feeding innovation processes and gathering knowledge on relevant stakeholder and contextual insights, we aim to ensure that Ambient Experience solutions address the real needs of people in today's increasingly complex healthcare environments.