Pathways to family-centered healthcare: co-designing AI solutions with families in pediatric rehabilitation

Editorial reading guide · Collaboration

If our family helped design an AI care tool, which daily problem and relationship should it support first?

Families helped define what an AI rehabilitation assistant should do rather than being asked merely to accept a finished device. The online MiniCoDe workshop elicited everyday difficulties and used design fiction to imagine support, including flexible prompts, clinician communication, and help that fitted household routines. Privacy, cost, oversight, and preserving human empathy were part of the design problem.

Study context

Nine Italian families of children with unilateral cerebral palsy, four clinicians, and two computer-science facilitators

Age / stage: Children 5–14 years

Read with three questions

1. Which proposed functions came from families’ lived routines rather than the technology team’s initial assumptions?
2. How did families balance a child’s autonomy with caregiver and clinician oversight?
3. What would need to be tested with children before these imagined features could be treated as helpful rehabilitation support?

Keep the limits in view

This was a small, selected workshop associated with a particular rehabilitation project and country. Design-fiction proposals are not a working-product evaluation; no clinical, independence, burden, or safety benefit was demonstrated. Adult family accounts and workshop dynamics can also constrain the visibility of children’s own preferences.