Co-designing Minimalist Wearables to Support Physical Rehabilitation after Peripheral Nerve Transfer Surgery

Designing technologies to support long-term rehabilitation is challenging, particularly when patients’ needs, capacities, and expectations evolve over extended periods of recovery. This article reports on a three-year Research through Design project exploring how wearable technologies might scaffold rehabilitation practices for individuals recovering from peripheral nerve transfer surgery. Working with a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, therapists, engineers, design researchers, and patients, we developed a series of minimalist smartwatch-based prototypes that provide real-time multisensory movement feedback designed to integrate into everyday rehabilitation routines with minimal setup and interaction burden. We contribute: (1) a set of exploratory smartwatch-based prototypes that demonstrate how minimalist multisensory feedback can support repetition-based therapeutic exercises; (2) an account of the multidisciplinary design journey based on embodied sketching through which these prototypes emerged; and (3) a discussion of key design qualities and tensions encountered, including the implementation of multisensory feedback, versatility and dual designs. These contributions extend the understanding of how wearable technologies can be designed for complex rehabilitation contexts and point toward more adaptable, situated, and ethically attuned approaches to technology-supported care. Note: This is a preprint (non-peer-reviewed) version of the work. Further versions will be linked from here.