Validation of User Needs Using a Design Prototyping - Development of Design Concepts in Wearable Cardioverter-Defibrillator(WCD) -

We attempted to implement Human Centered Design(HCD) according to the following three steps : (1) deriving user needs, (2) conducting ideation based the derived user needs, and (3) developing design concepts. The research on users and experts requires substantial time and cost, and there has not been an effective and clear-cut means to validate the research results before developing design concepts. We therefore extended the means of usability test to a context-based character. We applied this test for the development of design for Wearable Cardioverter-Defibrillator(WCD). Would this test be applied to various cases in the fields of medical equipment/apparatus development – which relatively takes a longer time to be developed – it would aid in accumulating and categorizing the reference data for variables incorporated for evaluating such cases. Future studies are needed to complement our findings concerning context-based usability tests.