Towards a convergent approach to the use of data in digital health design

Digital health is a vibrant and dynamic field, encompassing subsets such as mobile health, health information technology, wearable devices, telehealth and telemedicine, and personalised medicine. While digital health adoption has been markedly accelerated by the covid-19 pandemic (Inkster et al., 2020), an evolving body of research has focused on describing and addressing specific challenges related to the design and evaluation of digital health technologies (Pagliari, 2007; Murray et al., 2016; Blandford et al., 2018; Marvel et al., 2018). This research articulates a need for novel, interdisciplinary design approaches to digital health innovation, integrating disparate sets of requirements such as clinical soundness, user-centeredness, technical interoperability, and cost-effectiveness (Cornet et al., 2019). In this complex domain, design and health disciplines are called not only to collaborate with each other, but also to learn to work with digital data as the raw material fueling digital technologies. This dissertation explores such challenges through a series of exploratory research efforts at the intersection of design, healthcare and digital data. These explorations are conducted within the context of the Cardiolab, a Delft Design Lab born out of a partnership between Philips Experience Design and Delft University of Technology. Throughout the dissertation, knowledge in this domain is gained through a mix of literature reviews and project-based action research (Somekh, 2005). In this way, the relevant scientific literature is connected and put in dialogue with real-life digital health design practice.