A Design Perspective on Future Healthcare Services for the Home Environment

A recent paradigm shift in healthcare merges the traditional domains of cure and care in healthcare services with prevention and provides all of us with more participation as well as more responsibility in our own healthcare. This shift creates not only a need for personalization of services but also a design challenge with respect to inclusion and acceptance. Healthcare moves into people’s homes and merges medical devices with services hereby enlarging the current contrast between medical device cleanliness and the often cozier and textile-rich home environment. These developments bring important design challenges that will be addressed in this chapter, thereby raising important questions for the implementation of a new design perspective on healthcare.