End-user development in the medical domain

Nowadays, users are evolving from consumers of content and tools to producers of them, also becoming co-designers of their tools and content. In this paper we report on a methodology that supports this evolution. It derives from our experience in participatory design projects to develop multimedia systems to be used by professional people in their work practice, supporting these people not only in performing activities in their specific domain, but also allowing them to tailor their virtual tools and environments and even to create and modify software artifacts. The latter are defined activities of End-User Development (EUD). We show in this paper why EUD is particularly needed in the medical domain and how the methodology we have defined can be successfully applied to this domain.