human-centered design

The digital transformation of healthcare results in lasting changes in speech therapy. Smart technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) are creating new opportunities to ensure therapy quality, address care bottlenecks, and actively involve patients in exercise processes. At the same time, these developments are expanding the role of speech therapists, who increasingly use digital systems as supportive tools in addition to their core therapeutic tasks. Based on a feasibility study of the AI-supported application ISi-Speech-Sprechen in a real-world setting of complex Parkinson's therapy (PKT), this article outlines the key challenges associated with implementing smart technologies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers significant potential to enhance industrial quality control, yet successful implementation requires careful consideration of ethical and human factors. This article examines how automated surface inspection systems can be deployed to augment human capabilities while ensuring ethical integration into workflows. Through design science research, twelve stakeholders from six organizations across three continents are interviewed and twelve sociotechnical design requirements are derived. These are organized into pre-implementation and implementation/operation phases, addressing human agency, employee participation, and responsible knowledge management. Key findings include the critical importance of meaningful employee participation during pre-implementation, and maintaining human agency through experiential learning, building on existing expertise. This research contributes to ethical AI workplace implementation by providing guidelines that preserve human ...

With the rapid spread of assistive AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, companies are being challenged to address the opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence. Based on two practical examples, this article provides insight into how companies can use company-specific risk and potential analyses to develop guidelines for the fair and responsible use of AI.

Demographic change is accompanied by both a growing demand for care and a shortage of qualified nursing staff. Consequently, AI-based technologies are increasingly becoming a focus of care-related innovations. Their aim is to reduce workload pressure, save time, and enhance the attractiveness of the nursing profession. Using the example of AI-supported documentation systems for admission interviews, this article examines to what extent such systems can contribute to improvements in work processes and care quality, focusing on the perspectives of nursing professionals and nursing experts. The results indicate potential for workload relief, enhanced documentation quality, and the reallocation of time resources toward direct patient care. However, realizing these potentials requires a human-centered and context-sensitive implementation approach.

With the advent of digitalization, prevailing paradigms – such as product centricity, face-to-face collaboration and hierarchical structures – are giving way to the vision of data-driven business models, digital, collaborative ecosystems and an agile, holacratic way of working in flat hierarchies and self-managing teams. Collaboration is made possible through the use of software solutions. In addition to adapted management concepts, the digital space also requires a digital cultural understanding on part of the companies involved. Lean empowerment is a pioneering approach to collaboration based on cultural values. In expert workshops, ideas were developed to explore how these values can be lived in a digital culture and thus in terms of global digital collaboration. This article presents concrete solutions from which requirements for digital collaboration and for implementation within IT structures and software solutions in particular can be derived.

Many production processes are changing towards hybrid CPPS, in which humans work together with intelligent as well as automated or autonomously acting systems. This enables economic advantages through more efficient processes, error reduction, and quality improvements. It further contributes to a sustainable production, which preserves resources and enhances operators' well-being. To achieve these advantages, an adequate system design is required. Here, various design approaches are available, such as the creation of active involvement of people and adequate situational awareness, and the consideration of both operators and automation as equal and independent actors. But how do they affect its performance and the operators in detail to achieve both economic and human-centered goals? We present the results of a first literature review on the interaction of humans and autonomous systems in production systems and the associated allocation of work (Human Autonomy Teaming, HAT) and open ...