Global Health Design: Clinical Immersion, Opportunity Identification and Definition, and Design Experiences

摘要

We have developed an experiential learning global health design program that emphasizes direct interactions with stakeholders and first-hand exposure to the contexts in which solutions will be implemented. Students in the program gain practical hands-on experience identifying and defining unmet global health needs in low-resource settings and apply human-centered and co-creative design approaches. Device designs that incorporate rigorously collected and analyzed first-hand data from diverse users and stakeholders rather than anecdotal or poorly represented information are more effective at meeting true needs. To date, more than 100 undergraduate student participants have identified hundreds of needs in collaboration with sub-Saharan and Asian healthcare providers. Approximately 400 students from the U.S., Ghana, Ethiopia, and Uganda have contributed to the generation of technology concept solutions to address these needs. Program outcomes include approximately 100 student design projects completed at multiple institutions, student-led design-based conference publications and journal articles, device commercialization, and peer-to-peer mentoring within traditional capstone design courses. In this paper we describe the curricular elements of the clinical immersion and design ethnography experience. Additionally, we describe programmatic best practices that have emerged over the past 10 years and challenges students encounter when performing this front-end design work.