gms | German Medical Science

Frame: “Augmented Auditory Intelligence” (A2I) is an ongoing, three years BMBF-funded research project with seven partners from both, academia and industry [1]. It aims for a new multisensory platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze health data collected in and on the ear to improve audiological, as well as cardiological care processes.

A central research question of A2I is the acceptance of AI-augmented systems in the healthcare sector, more precisely the design of human-machine collaboration and the transparency of decision-making. Thus one important area of the project are state-of-the-art methodologies from design and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) to develop human-centered technologies.

Baseline: Despite given and established standards such as the User-Centered Design process from DIN EN ISO 9241-210:2010 [2] and corresponding methods, and despite the regulatory needs for usability engineering [3], in our domain these often qualitative approaches are rarely integrated within early development steps and requirements analysis.

Participatory workshop: In November 2022 we organized a participatory workshop with 11 participants, ten of which wearing CI devices, in AB’s European Research Center. One of the participants was the father of a teenaged patient and one patient was visually impaired as well. In the first section of the 1.5 hrs workshop, the participants had been asked to identify their personal gains and pains according to a predefined patient journey and their individual experience. They individually formulated their feedback and mapped the resulting post-its to the respective steps of the patient journey on a printed poster. Afterwards all jointly discussed the most important aspects together in the group (Figure 1 [Fig. 1]). The second part used card sorting as a method to explore the participants’ needs: A range of nine value propositions and possible features of hearing systems and CI devices from the A2I project were presented and sorted by the participants in a hierarchical order according to the respective value. Contrary to our expectations, the participants quickly and unanimously agreed on an order.

Results and benefits: Any of the workshop participants showed high motivation and reported independently that they were very pleased that their voice was already being heard early in the development process.

The results underline that non-functional, psychological aspects and fears are a massive driver.

Structuring the given features mirrored these results and showed highest ranks for…

1.

Improving hearing quality and situational hearing.

2.

Applying own adjustments via a usable and simple app.

3.

Social functions as common exchange, learning groups, and shared trainings.

A retrospective of the approach shows that we were able to gain early insights in a very efficient way that otherwise would have been incorporated into work of developers at a much later stage.