The Unique Insights of Home Visits

At Design Science, our research most often focuses on the environments of medical professionals—ORs, cath labs, clinics. Yet some of the most rewarding research I have conducted here has involved visiting patients’ homes. Accompanied by a videographer, I’ve traveled past cornfields and baseball diamonds to meet families that are coping with serious conditions and investigate how they are wielding the medical tools and technologies they need to lead fuller and more independent lives. Read more

Getting to the Root

Human behavior can be hard to predict and even harder to explain. Study participants will often manage to do similar things in different ways, and they’ll rarely work with the same tools with equal proficiency.

What seems chance, or random, for one participant may be choice, or regular, for another. But the difference between chance and choice is critical when evaluating medical devices. Read more