The Role of Design in Healthcare Innovation and Future Digital Health

This chapter explores the role of design disciplines within healthcare innovation and digital health. Through defining design, we provide an overview of the evolution and current roles of design disciplines as a means to explore the contributions of different design disciplines to healthcare innovation. Furthermore, we discuss the ways that design can humanize technology and how inter and transdisciplinary collaborations, where designers from different specializations interact with engineers, health professionals, and others, can be powerful agents for creating current and future innovations in this sector. The chapter provides an overall view of types of applications and implementations of design disciplines in healthcare design and digital health, going from design of hospitals and health spaces to medical equipment, and others, with special emphasis in apps and wearables for digital health and wellbeing. Through a discussion of design projects, initiated and implemented by the authors, where designers and researchers collaborate with engineers, medical professionals and other disciplines, centred on health care and delivery; we reflect on the inter and transdisciplinary innovation processes. We highlight benefits and challenges of these types of collaborations and explore possible avenues for integrating and developing the projects further, through the use of emerging technologies. Future trends and forecasts, especially around new virtual lives afforded by emerging technology applications, offer new future scenarios by using design fiction narratives. The chapter ends with possible implications of future digital health applications, including a critique from social points of view.