Rehabilitation Design Intervention for Older Adult Women through Community-based Co-Design Activities

Abstract

This study focused on rehabilitation design intervention for older adult women with low-back pain through community-based co-design activities. The aim was to gain insights from codesign approach to rehabilitation design for older people. A series of collaborative design activities were arranged to organize the design phases and get the data that guide the contents in the subsequent phases by evaluating and adapting initial conditions and design solutions. Firstly, we conducted an exploratory research to analyse the current situation for health conditions and identify major health problems related to older people. In this stage, we found that low-back pain is the major health problem among older adult women from the community of older people in the senior care centre. Secondly, the results of co-design activities were presented, which defined design target and specifications that lead to the early design and development of rehabilitation design intervention. Finally, a confirmatory research was conducted in which the effect of the rehabilitation design intervention on muscle activation level and low-back pain intensity of the older adult women was measured. The results showed that the intervention has positively influenced both muscle activation level and low-back pain intensity. This study can be concluded that the collaboration among multiple stakeholders can enable clear views on the end-user’s abilities in design research, which minimize the gap between community members who are central to the study and the design team. The outcomes of such collaborations can contribute to the design of a rehabilitation intervention for affordable healthcare system and also to the portability and ubiquity of the exercise training for older adult women.