User Involvement

The project has consulted with users of stroke services and their carers together with stroke therapists throughout the research.

At an early stage the Stroke Association recruited service users and their carers to a number of focus groups which discussed the possible use of rehabilitation technology and principles to guide the development of prototypes.

An initial focus group was undertaken to identify potential barriers to the use of technology. The team also conducted a focus group with stroke therapists to determine the key functional activities used in rehabilitation in the home environment. They also identified priority movements required to achieve the functional goals and these became the movements used in the development of the SMART system. Further focus groups were undertaken to establish the clinical need in relation to feedback provided by the SMART system and to consider how they might use the system in practice.

A further aspect of the user engagement was in the development of the clothing attachments for the sensors. During this phase the project team worked with a group of 10 users and 6 carers, with lo-fidelity prototypes, video analysis and interviewing techniques.

Here are some early video clips of focus group with users trying different ways of attaching the devices to the arm.

Usability testing with 20 users was carried out in a variety of settings such as stroke clubs and hospital stroke units in order to understand how typical users, especially first time users would manage the system. This led to rapid iterations of the software interface.

At the end of the project four users and their carers were involved with testing the latest version of the SMART system in their own home. Here are some movie clips of two users testing out the system in their own homes. Both people had the system to test for 2 weeks recording their given exercises each day on the SMART computer. The first two clips show the two users (with very different abilities post stroke) recording an exercise. The third clip shows one of the users reviewing the exercise on screen and comparing his movement with a pre-recorded target movement.

Further development of the system is being carried on under the TARGET programme.

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