Background: In the last decade, research has highlighted the importance of interprofessional approaches to education and practice. Collaboration between medical practice and engineering has been identified as particularly relevant to developing accountable models for sustainable healthcare and overcoming increased specialization leading to professional barriers. This study aims to analyze insights and understanding expressed by nursing students and biomedical engineering students following a joint learning activity regarding a medical device used in the hospital setting.

Method: A qualitative approach deriving from a phenomenological view examined an interprofessional learning activity where the focus was on active integration and knowledge exchange.

Conclusion: The activity was expressed as a positive opportunity for getting insights into perspectives from other professional groups as well as insights into the importance of a system perspective in patient safety. The learning and insights listed in the evaluations included ideas about how the two professional groups could collaborate in the future.

Today, health care systems face a number of challenges related to technological developments. This work in progress is a new Swedish initiative for collaboration between nursing science and engineering focusing digitization, demographics and participation. The initiative aims at understanding how digitization affects patients and health care professionals and the role of engineers and how this collaboration proactively contributes to systems that support caring and nursing. The presentation expects input on the programs substance and boundaries and whether this initiative is fruitful to create sustainable health care systems.

There are good reasons to believe that furniture designers can play an important role in the design of appropriate caring environments and thus contribute to the care that is provided. Designers are usually engaged by manufacturers that develop furniture for public procurement and a market for elderly consumers but often do not learn from those who spend their everyday lives in these environments. This paper is based on industrial design and presents a study that explores the relationships between people and furniture in nursing homes. Thematic interviews were carried out with residents and personnel, in total 21 participants. The study was carried out in three nursing homes in Stockholm. The results suggest that elderly people strive for a sense of home in their private rooms in contrast to shared rooms and that the perspectives on furniture differ between the elderly people and the personnel. The conclusion is that understanding the role of furniture at nursing homes can help to reinforce the identity of elderly residents and their needs of continuity, socialization and existential safety. The recommendations are to involve the experiences of elderly people in the design processes and to make more informed furniture investment decisions for nursing homes.

This chapter presents a telehealth system called GiraffPlus supporting independent living of elderly in their own home. GiraffPlus system is a complex system which monitors activities and physiological parameters in the home using a network of sensors. The elaborated information is presented to the primary user, the elderly, and to secondary users like health care and home care providers and possibly to family members as a help to assess possible health and wellbeing deterioration, provide acute alarms, and support health procedure. The secondary users can also visit the elderly via the Giraff, a teleoperated robot that can communicate and move in the home under the control of the secondary user. The chapter focusses in particular on the deployment of the system in six real homes in Sweden, Italy and Spain. The chapter outlines the technological various components used, the expectations of the users and the evaluation method.

The aim of the NavMem project is to develop a mobile navigation companion for elderly persons with memory decline (MCI). The project is intended for a wide range of target users-e.g. persons with memory problems due to early dementia, stroke but also elderly persons in general. In the following we report results from studies made together with the Swedish Stroke Association. We describe the early stages of the user centered design process and provide a list of requirements. We also provide initial designs and early prototypes and report preliminary results from recent user tests.

Design professionals with a commitment to participatory design all want to engage with real people. A focus of discussion at the workshop was the nature of this engagement and how to rethink the dynamic relationship between older people and the designers in the design process. Working directly within the everyday practices of a group with similar interests independent of their age, physical abilities, or professional practices can help researchers co-create concepts in everyday contexts. In practice there are various ways that designers can be more reflective about their own conceptualizations of aging. At a very simple level, designers can reflect on and integrate an enriched understanding of aging as a positive adaptive process into the design visuals and design languages they create, namely the pictures and slogans they use, the logos they design, and the forms of communications and prototypes they build.

Older technology users and their integration into IT society have been on the research agenda since digitalization took off. Given the attempts to develop user-driven design, it is surprising that the appearance of technologies older people are provided with, or are the target group for, have not progressed. Now another political agenda, coined as "welfare technology", is being launched in Scandinavia. It is the reminiscent of previous arguments for why demographics, welfare and the need for new business arenas should be prioritized. This paper argues that STS-inspired design can contribute to a paradigm shift that breaks this trend and instead helps to develop proactive technology that meets the needs and demands of today’s senior citizens. Two cases illustrate the way the imbalance between technology and older people’s influence persists over time. Another three cases with a bearing on design sciences are singled out and discussed: the selection of older subjects; the understanding of the "social" in going from the laboratory to real-life settings; and the "making of meaning" in product development. The conclusions point to the opportunity to bridge the imbalance when introducing welfare technology by introducing STS-inspired reflections on engineering and design.