How does a computer game turn into a fun way for rehabilitation and training for elderly citizens?

AmbiGate

AmbiGate is a company specializing in gamification rehabilitation systems. Their primary focus so far with their product AmbiCoach has been people sitting in an office, those that lack movement in their every day and want to prevent back or neck pain by doing some training at an office space to prevent pain in the future or for maintenance training. This product together with the Danish communication platform Life-Manager wanted to combine their solutions into one and explore if this would give value to the citizens. In this way would AmbiGate change their primary area of focus and also retrofit their solution to add value to it. Together with this AmbiGate were also interested on how does the Danish healthcare and welfare system and market potential look like.

Challenge

A change of area and product validation, simultaneously exploring new market potential options. They needed input from real citizens and healthcare experts in the rehabilitation field in order to be able to understand how to develop their product in a better way to fit with the elderly citizens’ needs. They are a German company and therefore were missing insights about the way the Danish healthcare system is organized as well as statistical data in this segmentation field.

Approach

We created a simulation set up with the new solution into our simulation apartment and tested it ourselves until becoming a super user of the system in order to be able to demonstrate and conduct demo-tests together with the users.

We started by constructing interview guide and structure and planned 2 consecutive workshops – one with elderly citizens, who were going for rehabilitation every week, and one with healthcare professionals from different municipalities. As an external consultancy for the company, we had no expertise or previous knowledge of the product in advance and can therefore meet both citizens and employees without specific expectations. This creates a safe space for experience sharing, where there is an opportunity to explore the possibility for the product in the Danish healthcare market together with healthcare professionals, due to our knowledge about the professionals’ every day work life. At the same time, we can ensure that all respondents are completely anonymous, so people have the opportunity to share their experiences. During the sessions the system was demonstrated and tested by the users and the occupational and physical therapists. This gave inspiration, validation and a lot of useful ideas and insights both for the citizens, therapists and also for AmbiGate on what is considered meaningful in this area for rehabilitation.

Lastly, all insights were taken into consideration and recommendations for the Danish market were given. After some desk research to validate some of the findings and statistical data, market size potential and segmentation were presented.

Result

These generated many valuable insights and gave a broader perspective to where should AmbiGate focus on when shifting their area to elderly citizens. We managed to unfold the user insights and requirements for a new version of the system. There were given suggestions and recommendations to what was perceived as most important, meaningful and valuable to the users.

Last but not least, a perspective on the Danish welfare and healthcare system was provided, with statistical data and market size potential on the chosen segments. Recommendations for next steps and market entry into Denmark were concluded.