JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Participatory co-design is a design approach that involves end-users in intervention design and its use in healthcare applications has become widespread. Traditionally, co-design has been conducted in-person in a lab-based setting however, it has recently shifted to being performed remotely. Remote co-design has the potential to overcome some of the limitations of traditional in-person approaches including expanding a study’s geographic reach, recruiting participants from underrepresented groups, reducing power imbalances between researchers and participants, and enhancing engagement through online tools. Given these benefits, further reporting and refinement of remote co-design methods is needed.

Objective:

This paper’s objective is to present our Remote and Accessible Participatory Intervention Design (RAPID) method and discuss the choices and challenges we encountered adapting participatory co-design for remote use.

Methods:

We adapted our previously developed 5-step in-person participatory co-design method health intervention design. To apply the adapted co-design method, we recruited two groups of five participants (one of older adult pharmacy patients and the other of pharmacy staff) to design a digital kiosk for use by older adults to promote safe over-the-counter medication purchases in retail pharmacies.

Results:

Adaptations made to the co-design process were classified under the following categories: facilitation; collaboration, communication, and sensemaking; accessibility and universality; tangible tools and games; and research compliance. Overall, the remote co-design process took longer when compared to in-person due to shorter sessions and between session refinement, but it allowed for flexible scheduling and makeup sessions when required.

Conclusions:

Our RAPID method offers an approach to remote co-design that other teams can implement or adapt to their needs. Our experiences with RAPID identify certain drawbacks to remote co-design, however, these are balanced by advantages in convenience and flexibility.