Towards co-design of rehabilitation technologies: a collaborative approach to prioritize usability issues.

The usability testing included only five people with spinal cord injury, all male, recruited through researchers' networks, so the issues found may not represent a wider group. The system was a prototype at Technology Readiness Level 5, not a released clinical treatment, and the paper reports usability issues and design tasks. The original usability participants were not the main raters; separate stakeholders assigned ratings, and only two individuals with lived experience of spinal cord injury were involved in significance and priority ratings. Some issues were found and fixed during parallel technical testing before the rating process finished, so the roadmap order was influenced by project resources and timing as well as stakeholder ratings. The method was demonstrated for one spinal cord injury rehabilitation system, so it is unclear how well it transfers to other devices or clinical settings.

The authors declare financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication. The research was supported by the Motor Accident Insurance Commission, Queensland, Australia, as part of the BioSpine project and The Hopkins Centre, and by an Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellowship (AQIRF049-2020-CV to CS).

Do not read this as evidence that the brain-computer rehabilitation system improves function or that co-design makes therapy better. It describes a prototype tested by five people and a process for prioritizing usability issues.