CAPTAIN: 1st Design Thinking Session with the active participation of end-users

All CAPTAIN pilot partners (AUTH, INTRAS, DCU, APSS and AMEN) ran the first out of the three Design Thinking sessions of the project with the active participation of CAPTAIN stakeholders’ community (older adults, their relatives and professional caregivers) from late November to the beginning of December 2018.

The aim of this first design meet-up with end-users was the understanding of the real daily needs, which the future CAPTAIN technology will have to address. To this end, all the conducted Design Thinking sessions were based on the co‐creation principles, , with the active involvement of older adults, caregivers and healthcare service providers in the design activities of the project (ideation phase). To give a voice to as many as possible stakeholder, most of the sessions were held as open to the public events.

All the participants had the opportunity to be informed about the CAPTAIN project and its main objectives. End-users, professionals and CAPTAIN’s moderators joined their forces in each of the five countries, where the sessions took place (Greece, Spain, Italy, Cyprus and Ireland), mapping the difficulties that older adults’ often face in everyday aspects of their lives and finding out the ways they use to tackle or limit them. All the participants provided valuable input to the CAPTAIN team through ice-break games, post-its, personal stories, jokes, etc., so as to enrich its knowledge about older adults’ needs and to implement it into the design of the future CAPTAIN e-coach system.

Moreover, the attendants of the five sessions got introduced to the CAPTAIN community, the community of the project stakeholders, who will be the exclusive source of requirements throughout the project’s lifecycle, having the important and substantial role of co-designers and co-producers, interacting with the future prototypes of the CAPTAIN system and providing their feedback. All participants appeared impressed from the fact that the same process was happening in the same period in other countries, expressing their will for being informed of the needs and the problems of people at their age face in the rest countries involved in CAPTAIN’s pilot sessions. Also, most of them were satisfied with the fact that the CAPTAIN team is deeply interested in listening to their needs and expressed their desire to participate in the next steps of the project, becoming active members of the European CAPTAIN community.