Exploring Using Personalised Comics for Healthcare Communication for Patients Living With Hemodialysis

Through co-design with patients undergoing hemodialysis and their healthcare professionals, we worked towards discovering how to create a personalised, welcoming, yet quick and accurate method for medical instruction communication. Exploring possibilities of meeting the widely differing goals of patients and their healthcare professionals led to designing a personalisable method for creating comics. Through ongoing discussions during the comic creation process, we explored variations in comic styles and personalisation factors such as choosing and modifying the appearance of the comic personalities, the settings, the central topics, and word usage to create the comics. Interest in using the approach that supports the creation of medical comics was high among patients and healthcare professionals. Rich feedback was obtained about information to be included and future direction for such medical comic creation support. We reflect on lessons learned during co-design with healthcare givers and patients.