Prior research shows that involving children in the development of technology is valuable, though challenging. Involving child-patients may come with additional difficulties, but as technology is gaining importance in (pediatric) care, it is important to uncover these difficulties. This paper identifies the difficulties of involving child-patients in the development of technology. We do so by reflecting on a project at the Sophia Children’s Hospital, where we involved 17 children (of which 12 child-patients) in developing a mobile application for their participation in pediatric brain care. Our identified challenges are related to the recruitment of child-patients and the need to adapt the organization and content of our design research set-up, based on who we were able to recruit and how we recruited them. By identifying these challenges, we make designers and researchers aware of issues that may arise when involving child-patients in technology development and present guidelines to deal with them.

Research has highlighted a need for a specific and practical implementation framework for deploying Lean Six Sigma (LSS) in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The success of LSS implementation in SMEs is highly dependent on the extent to which an LSS deployment programme addresses the specific properties of SMEs. In this study we have evaluated an existing framework for Six Sigma implementation for SMEs [Kumar, M., Antony, J., & Tiwari, M. K. (2011). Six Sigma implementation framework for SMEs – a roadmap to manage and sustain the change. International Journal of Production Research, 49(18), 5449–5467] using a multi-method triangulation approach. The objectives of this study were firstly to strengthen the foundations of the existing framework by uncovering evidence for some of its elements and, secondly, to identify the proposed revisions to the framework, especially focussed on its application in manufacturing SMEs. The results of our study are a collection of confirmations and revision proposals for the framework, leading to a revised conceptual framework.