Patient-centred design of aphasia therapy apps: a scoping review

Abstract

Technology is being increasingly used in language therapy to raise intervention frequency and effect. Involving patients in the design process of healthcare software programmes can improve the quality and effectiveness, as well as the patient’s independence in their use. For German speaking patients few apps are currently available, although more are under development. This scoping review was conducted to map the current evidence for whether people with aphasia have been actively involved in the process of design and development of apps for mobile device aphasia therapy in the German language countries. Our search Medline, Speechbite, PsycInfo, Cochrane, Google Scholar, in addition to some relevant German journals and the grey literature, identified 504 articles; with 14 papers meeting our inclusion criteria. These papers related to three German apps (SpeechCare, DiaTrain, neolexon). Most of the included papers reported software development processes (n=11); three papers described evaluation studies. Patients were involved in many steps of these development processes, though detailed descriptions of user participation were missing. The analysis mapped out four common phases of app development comprising (1) preliminary theoretical considerations, (2) software development, (3) prototype testing and (4) product evaluations. A consensus on how best to engage end users in development processes of future apps could be highly
relevant to product developers, researchers and practitioners.