Establishing a collaboration between care providers and engineers

Although a lot of research effort has focused on the development of new technologies that support healthcare professionals, only a small fraction of these developments penetrate the healthcare market. The reasons for this are multi-factorial, but in our opinion a major problem is the lack of cooperation between engineers and care providers during the early research phase. An improved collaboration between engineers and care providers would ensure that the developed products better match the needs of the care providers and hence facilitate the marketing of the developed product. To improve this collaboration throughout the entire research phase, a new strategy is presented in this paper. An important step in this strategy is the incorporation of an engineering lab within a nursing facility, which is set-up during the project ‘Ingenieurs@WZC’.