Design professionals use a variety of techniques to incorporate user experience into the design of products and services. Applying their techniques to healthcare could help to create an inclusive system that is functional, safe and satisfying.

Volume fluctuations dramatically affect the daily fit and function of amputees’ prosthetic limbs.  This design and medicine collaboration provides a platform for compiling accurate and consistent residuum volume data and shape characterization.  The method has the potential to affect prosthetic limb design and fit.

With our aging population and subsequent increased pressures on the healthcare sector, hospitalisation and rehabilitation stays are becoming shorter. Home and family are being called upon to act as informal hospital and informal carer. So, just as the specialist nurse is being supplemented by the untrained family carer, the designed hospital environment is being supplemented, and in some cases replaced, by mainstream project-built houses.

This paper examines the potential in extending electronic patient records with capability to include interaction profiles of consultation and treatment processes, and the incorporation of such profiles in the healthcare process. Proposed ICT design is simple and compact. It can operate on different devices and support visual reasoning about the quality of interactions in different healthcare contexts and at different points of healthcare delivery.

The possibility of patient participation in all manner of treatments is an issue inseparable from the intelligibility of medical actions and possibilities. In this paper the authors scrutinize  some of the roles of technology within the audiological consultation in order to critically examine their effects on the interaction between audiologist and patient, with particular attention to difficulties encountered with respect to the intelligibility to the patient of the audiologist’s actions.

Designers and design-led methods can bring innovative solutions to healthcare, but just as importantly, its approach places key healthcare stakeholders at the heart of developing these solutions. Projects such as Alzheimer 100 provide us with practical case studies to deepen our understanding of how designers, design-led methods and approaches can be applied to meet challenges facing healthcare today.