What makes a home? Designing home personas to represent the homes of families caring for children with medical complexity

• Published in: Applied ergonomics Vol. 106; p. 103900
• Main Authors: Barton, Hanna J., Pflaster, Ellen, Loganathar, Shanmugapriya, Werner, Allison, Tarfa, Adati, Wilkins, David, Ehlenbach, Mary L., Katz, Barbara, Coller, Ryan J., Valdez, Rupa, Werner, Nicole E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Elsevier Ltd 01-01-2023
• Subjects: Child; Children with medical complexity; Ergonomics - methods; Humans; Macroergonomics; Patient work; Persona; Sociotechnical system; Sociotechnical system; Patient work; Macroergonomics; Persona; Children with medical complexity
• ISSN: 0003-6870; 1872-9126
• DOI: 10.1016/j.apergo.2022.103900

Personas are widely recognized as valuable design tools for communicating dimensions of individuals, yet they often lack critical contextual factors. For those people managing chronic health conditions, the home is a critical context of their patient work system (PWS). We propose the development of ‘home personas’ to convey essential aspects of the home context to those tasked with designing technologies and interventions to fit it. We used an iterative, multi-stakeholder design process to design ‘home personas’ for a model population, families caring for children with medical complexity. Each of the four resultant home personas—Multi-level, Customized, Ranch, and Rental—has a unique home layout, pain points, and are described on three dimensions that emerged from the data. This study builds on a foundation of work in the emerging field of Patient Ergonomics, describing a mechanism for distilling rich descriptions of the PWS into brief yet informative design tools.
•The home is an influential context for the health work of patients and caregivers.•Failure to design for the home creates otherwise preventable barriers to care.•Home personas distill care work system interactions into practical design tools.•Findings contribute a new method to the emerging field of Patient Ergonomics.