Jessie Mitchell

Spinal cord injury (SCI) involves damage to the spinal cord or surrounding structures, often resulting in enduring sensory, motor, and autonomic impairments [1]. The consequences extend beyond phys...

Marketing scholarship increasingly emphasises social relevance through direct engagement with complex human problems, contested service systems and, increasingly, vulnerable consumer populations an...

Background: Co-design is an increasingly prominent method for achieving disability-inclusive research. Co-design draws attention to the value of involving people with lived experience of disability in shaping research questions, methods, and outcomes, making it an ideal vehicle for inclusion. Yet, the rise in popularity of co-design in disability research has created challenges. Inconsistent definitions, misaligned practices, and inadequate reporting have undermined both the rigour of the method and its potential to generate meaningful and impactful outcomes. Discussion: In this commentary, we argue that safeguarding the future of disability inclusive co-design requires a systemic shift towards accountability and transparency. We propose four urgent recommendations to enhance and maintain the integrity and impact of co-design: 1. Establish a shared language that distinguishes levels of participation, clarifies epistemic assumptions, and articulates underlying values. This is critical to ensure that co-design claims accurately reflect the nature of involvement. 2. Build capacity and capability for researchers and people with lived experience of disability. This includes in facilitation skills, ethical engagement, inclusive communication, and navigating power dynamics, to avoid tokenism and collaborate more effectively. 3. Develop a co-design-specific reporting framework to make relational, procedural, and decision-making processes more transparent. 4. Mandate better reporting of co-design practices by funders, journal editors, and institutions to ensure accountability and reportable rigour of co-design research with people with disability. Conclusion: Ultimately, co-design can either be a powerful tool for inclusive research or a hollow promise that perpetuates the exclusion it seeks to remedy. Adopting these recommendations for language, capacity, and standard, mandated reporting are essential steps for safeguarding the integrity of the method. It will also support more accountable, authentic, and impactful research that truly reflects the voices, priorities, and lived experiences of collaborators with disability.

Rehabilitation during community integration after acquired brain injury (ABI) focuses on supporting individuals to make sense of and manage injury-related changes in the context of occupational engagement. To improve understanding of the role of rehabilitation in facilitating early adjustment to ABI, the study aimed to understand individuals' rehabilitation priorities and expectations at hospital discharge and experiences at 3-months post-discharge. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with adults with ABI at discharge (n = 28) and 3-months post-discharge (n = 24) from a brain injury rehabilitation unit in Queensland, Australia. Data were thematically analysed using the Framework Method. Analysis identified an overarching theme of "Supporting self-continuity," comprising three interrelated themes. "Life's getting back on track" represented individuals' priority to access ongoing contextualized rehabilitation, enabling resumption of valued activities and roles. "My life on pause" reflected uncertainty about post-discharge processes for resuming occupations and feeling restricted by limitations and support gaps. "Collaborative fit: Matching my needs″, depicting the alignment between individual's mindset and expectations of life after ABI and personalization of rehabilitation services, and was central to self-continuity. Following discharge, collaborative fit between people with ABI and support systems is central to supporting self-continuity through enabling engagement in activities and roles important to self-identity.

Assistive technology (AT) can improve functional and technical capacity in the context of work for people with spinal cord injury/damage (SCI/D). This metasynthesis aimed to explore how AT is used to support the study and employment goals of people with SCI/D and their experiences of using AT for study or work. Six electronic databases (CINAHL, Embase, PsycINFO, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science) were systematically searched for qualitative studies reporting the lived experiences of people with SCI/D regarding the role of AT products in higher education or work. Twenty-three eligible studies were identified and appraised according to the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research, with relevant key findings included in this metasynthesis. Two superordinate themes were identified. Workforce accessibility depicted the enabling nature of personalised AT when successfully integrated into users' roles and environments for study or work capacity and advancement. Navigation and connectedness represented the importance of self-advocacy, alongside support from educational institutions and workplaces, specialist services, and society more broadly, to ensure people's injury-related AT needs are met. Collectively, the findings highlight the interplay of personal, occupational, and environmental factors in supporting the work goals of people with SCI/D. Achieving person-AT-occupation fit within the context of the environment at all stages of AT access can be supported by self-advocacy training, specialised services and support, and inclusive workplace practices and policies.

In collaboration with end-users and other key stakeholders, this paper describes an innovation process of designing and manufacturing customized assistive technologies for regional and remote communities. The project collaboratively identified the real-world problems of people living with spinal cord injuries, created design solutions to overcome these challenges, and worked with manufacturers to turn these solutions into actual products. The project embodied a co-design method to bring people living with spinal cord injuries, occupational therapists, researchers, designers, and manufacturers together to co-create new solutions to overcome common challenges. Data was collected through the following methods: a desktop study of the literature and the market; an innovation process via 4 x co-design workshops (Ideation, Design and Develop, Pitch and Feedback, Demonstration) from June 2021 to June 2022; a Research through Design methodology to design 3D-printed assistive technologies. Through iterative virtual and physical prototyping, and user testing, the most effective prototypes were refined into the optimal solution. The Project established an innovation process, including online consultation and workshops with end-users, that prioritize 3D printing of assistive technology prototypes; created a demonstrator for allied health engagement and testing; and completed end-user pilot group testing, such as materials, durability, grasping, biomechanical advantage, adaptability, etc. This innovation process produced a minimum viable product (MVP) that has enough features to attract early adopters and provide design validation early in the product development cycle.

Pain is rarely suffered alone. In contemporary online contexts, publicly shared pain can command the collective attention of hundreds, even millions of people. We sought to explore the possibility that collectively attending to others' pain promotes affiliation among those with whom it is attended online and identify the mechanisms that mediate these effects. Across two experimental studies, utilizing independent group designs, physically dispersed undergraduate students attended to real‐world videos depicting either physical, social, or no‐pain online. In Study 1 (N = 74, 66.22% female, M_age = 25.31 years, SD_age = 6.81 years), we found evidence for the phenomenon of pain collectively attended to online, with online videos depicting physical and social pain eliciting stronger perceptions of collective attention than the non‐painful online video. In Study 2 (Time 1: N = 185, 75.14% female, M_age = 22.62 years, SD_age = 7.44 years; Time 2: N = 91, 72.53% female, M_age = 23.32, SD_age = 8.19), we subsequently found collectively attending to others' physical and social pain online indirectly promoted cohesion, interpersonal closeness, and desire to affiliate among participants through perceived emotional synchrony. This pattern of indirect effects was found immediately after collective attention to painful online content (Time 1) and at 1‐week follow‐up (Time 2). Although preliminary, our findings increase practical understanding of how shared pain can be harnessed to bond physically dispersed individuals together online, the implications of which we discuss in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic.