Navigating multi-country, multi-disciplinary co-design with families, adolescents and healthcare practitioners: the SmartCHANGE project.

<ns3:p>Early prevention of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) by improving lifestyle behaviors such as diet and physical activity among children and adolescents has significant potential to reduce the burden of disease and increase their quality of life. To address the high prevalence of risk factors for NCDs among children and adolescents, the SmartCHANGE project aims to co-design AI-supported health promotion tools for the European population. However, co-designing across multiple stakeholder groups and multiple countries while working with researchers and designers from different disciplinary backgrounds presents substantial challenges, for instance regarding different epistemological assumptions, variations in research terminology, and cultural differences. This paper outlines the SmartCHANGE co-design protocol including a theoretical framework, a table summarizing actionable goals and suggested activities to achieve them, a timeline comparing suggested session number per stakeholder group with design deadlines and a practical protocol describing potential sessions. To inform this flexible co-design protocol, researchers and designers in SmartCHANGE completed a questionnaire regarding local contexts and participated in interviews regarding their research aims and assumptions. Additionally, we conducted a literature search to situate the research within existing frameworks.</ns3:p>