Participatory Design of Health Technologies - Challenges and Requirements for Action from the Perspective of Health Services Research

The use of participatory design (PD) provides a framework for involving users in the process of developing healthcare technologies. Within PD, theoretical and methodological decisions need to be made. However, these decisions are often not adequately described or justified. This can lead to limited interpretability of the results. This paper has three objectives: First, to provide an overview of the key theoretical and methodological decisions that must be made in PD from the perspective of health services research; second, to describe the associated challenges and third, to describe action requirements for the future development of PD in health services research.