A team of researchers in the United Kingdom studied opportunities for collaboration between prosthesis users, academia, and other prosthetic device stakeholders to address the limitations of currently available devices. The researchers believe that their collaborative approach, which they call co-creation, can lead to the development of solutions and decrease the rate of prosthetic device abandonment.
The project included a user survey and a subsequent workshop involving people who use an upper-limb prosthesis and/or have experienced care services (users), academics, industry experts, charity executives, and clinicians. The survey asked users to prioritize six themes that academia, clinicians, and industry should focus on over the next decade.
The participants identified function, psychology, aesthetics, clinical service, collaboration, and media as the most important themes relevant to their everyday experiences and needs. Within five multi-stakeholder groups, the workshop participants discussed challenges and collaborative opportunities for each theme. Based on the groups’ discussions, function, clinical service, collaboration, and media were identified for further exploration in Phase 2.
The open-access study, “Co-creation and User Perspectives for Upper Limb Prosthetics,” was published in Frontiers in Neurorobotics.
