Our Design Together, Live Better initiative is an innovative, citizen-led design programme, which aims to help people living with challenging health conditions improve their quality of life and maximise independence.
We want to increase opportunities for citizens (patients and people living with long term conditions, as well as carers, NHS professionals, family members and friends) to get involved in sharing ideas for new solutions and help shape and develop new innovations in healthcare.
We are about now into phase three of this programme.
We launched the first phase of the Design Together, Live Better initiative in May 2015 in partnership with Designability, a leading design charity.
Throughout June and July 2015, we asked members of the public to share their daily experiences of living with a challenging health condition. Ideas were shared and discussed through a series of workshops, our website and social media and brought to life with a team of design specialists led by Designability.
Three ideas were selected and Designability worked closely with potential users to develop design prototypes for testing and, possibly, turning into new products.
Pura: a portable bidet for personal hygiene when away from home.
Read more about the three prototypes here.
In 2016, during the second phase of Design Together, Live Better, we supported two local innovators to engage with citizens and healthcare professionals to develop their prototype products using a combination of online surveys and face-to-face focus groups.
We worked with Jenny Dance of Phona, the creators of the Intelligent Sounds app, which is being designed to help improve the clarity of speech sounds by people whose speech has been affected as a result of a health condition (such as stroke, Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis or a head injury). Through the Design Together, Live Better initiative we recruited Speech and Language Therapists and SLT service users to remotely test the app and provide feedback on its usability and effectiveness. Read more.
We also supported Chloe Meineck (Studio Meineck) to engage with people living with dementia, and those who are close to them, to help shape and design the next stage of her Music Memory Box. The Music Memory Box is a personalised, multi-sensory tool for reminiscing. It is a novel keepsake box that contains objects chosen by the user to represent friends, family and key memories that are used to trigger specific pieces of music with which they are associated. Read more.
In the current phase Design Together, Live Better has evolved into hyvr, connecting people who are interested in creating or being part of designing new healthcare products with innovators of new technologies and solutions.
We are working with digital developers to help us create an effective and easy-to-use online engagement platform where these connections can happen. Visit hyvr.com to connect and find out out more.