After my tutorial on the independent study break (20th of July), I decided to proceed in a slightly different direction with my topic. The focus on stroke patients should remain the same, nevertheless, I realized that creating something which can be accessed from various institutions, such as hospitals and rehabilitation places, as well as the home would reach and support more people, rather than taking space that might be needed for more essential notions, such as spaces for patients in general. Supporting stroke patients also outside hospitals and making more people gain the ability to use a service seemed more effective and smart at this point of my project. Therefore thoughts of more defined research questions arose, such as ”How can stroke patients find more motivation and engage more with their equipment to get better, as well as being more responsible for their own health.”
As I explained, through my conversations and interviews, I realized that many stroke patients do not use or find inspiration in using their equipment to train their hands and make themselves feel better. With this, I recognized a real issue that could be solved by making the training more fun. Just like merging a real-life game with the stroke patient equipment and motivating the patient with this.
With this, the next steps came to my mind, such as interviewing a physiotherapist in order to find out how often and much people follow their ”homework”, and exercises to see if this new invention could be useful in this segment too.
With interventions, for instance, the intended game could be tested by stroke survivors and they could record their journey for a week (self-documentation). After this, process questions could be asked and the project could change and advance according to the feedback.
Other than this, another intervention could be to show the game and ask a group pf people questions about it. With this, issues can be highlighted such as difficulties in understanding can be figured out.
Factors that need to be realized are if it is tailored for the audience.
In this process, I realized and learned that creating an item that can be accessed by a bigger crowd can help more people instead of offering it just in one space.
Below you can find example images of equipment balls that often stroke patients cannot motivate themselves with using from the conversations I had.
