Within our academic center, collaboration among professionals from various disciplines to address and solve problems has been encouraged for many years. Approximately nine years ago, a unique collaborative effort was established when faculty from our Industrial Design and Nursing programs joined together to collaborate in a studio on an assisted mobility device project. To facilitate this collaborative effort, the student courses are synchronized over the course of a semester in which the students work together to generate innovative solutions to various health problems. It has been well documented in the literature that when health professionals work collaboratively as an integrated team, each person on the team practices on a higher level, resulting in improved patient outcomes and higher levels of patient satisfaction (Clarke & Hassmiller, 2013; Fawcett, 2014; Gray & Christov, 2017; Humbles, McNeal, & Paul-Richiez, 2017). The collaborative effort facilitates achievement of goals that are unable to be accomplished exclusively within a single discipline (Furr, Lane, Serafica, & Hodge, 2015; Williams, Merrill, Heise, & Novilla, 2014). Several years ago, our university president publicly supported a university-wide initiative addressing the need for concussion prevention, specifically among student athletes. With this in mind, collaboration between Industrial Design and Community Health Nursing has concentrated its studio activities on addressing concussion prevention. We felt that it would be beneficial to include various high risk sports at the elementary, secondary, and collegiate levels, as we were seeking to determine which populations were most vulnerable to mild traumatic brain injuries.
Students enrolled in the one of the design programs partnered with nursing students in a collaborative, conceptual studio to address problems encompassing the prevention of concussions. Together, the students formed teams and worked together utilizing both the nursing and design processes to gather research findings and collect specific data about their selected population. Using this data, the student teams conducted an in-depth analysis of the information and underwent an iterative process to develop several solutions that may benefit the target population. The student groups performed lab testing of products and transformed these into actual or conceptual products that were designed to benefit the end user. Since we implemented this initiative several years ago, our student teams have focused on concussion prevention in high-risk associated sports, including football across all student age groups, hockey, as well as cycling. Recently, we addressed concussion prevention among college-aged athletes participating in women’s soccer, women’s lacrosse, and cheerleading. Our student teams worked closely with patients, caregivers, doctors, and therapists to develop a clear understanding of how concussions occur in each of the sports. With this information, these students developed primary, secondary, or tertiary prevention strategies including education systems, virtual awareness training, or a wearable product solution. Since this time, some project results have undergone additional research to determine if they could be applied at a broader level.
