Contextual inquiry, shadowing, stakeholder interviews conducted in hospitals and clinical environment for nudging patients towards cardiac healthcare monitoring and reporting.
Extended project to three products and team size from 2 to 6 .Project was selected best demo of the year. Co-authored two international publications.
The project started with Samsung’s acquisition of a healthcare company that manufactured a wearable sensor that could measure and track heart rate very accurately. I connected the solution to not only the wearer of the sensor (the patient) but also to the clinicians and hospital ecosystem. This resulted in increased scope of the project and the team size increased from 2 to 5 designers working on three different solutions simultaneously.
The system thinking resulted in first draft of the information architecture, including how the application needs to instruct a new user to wear the sensor. The most important factor was to allow them to see the value in using the application even before they start attaching the sensor to their body.
As an experience designer, I lived and worked in the space between patients, clinicians and technology. The goal of the design solution was to bridge the gap between healthcare and technology providers and work together to create better outcomes for patients. With a holistic view of the patient experience in mind, the landing screen was designed in a way that it would always indicate if the sensor is working fine and show meaningful information along with ensuring that the doctor is always within reach.
For the desktop application for clinicians ,our team took a deep dive into the data visualisation process. We did a lot of work to understand the type of data that is generated by digital health devices, and we spoke with clinicians to understand what aspects of that data are most useful.
I co-authored a publication on information visualisation for risk evaluation among patients. In this paper, we discuss a method of facilitating doctor-patient conversation through an interactive information visualisation interface. Using risk prediction index and its discussion as the focus of the conversation, we present ways of using information visualisation principles and interaction design to support and encourage this activity, and enhance the experience of the discussion.This was the final concept of visualization that was conceptualized based on our research insight. The objective was to facilitate and engage doctors and patients during an in-person interaction.
The isolation view enables both patients and doctors to explore various influencing factors based on his/her lifestyle and habits. This triggers conversations and clarifications leading to a “nudge” in behaviour of the patients to be more involved in their self care.
Identification and Classification of Information:
The first step was to identify and organise the information that needed to be conveyed.
1) Identification of Information: The two primary data entities to be represented in this interface are the parameters and the overall risk index. For each parameter the following data dimensions must be represented:
a) Value: The absolute numeric or categorical value of the parameter. In the case of categorical variables, the values are of the binary type yes/no (presence or absence).
b) Severity: The extent of severity of the parameter’s value, i.e. normal, borderline or abnormal.
c) Impact: The level of impact, or the extent of contribution of the parameter to the calculation of the risk index for a particular disease. We defined 3 main levels of impact: high, medium and low; these are derived based on statistical calculations (the discussion of the same is outside the scope of this paper). In addition, we also included a fourth level for parameters whose extent of impact is statistically insignificant.
The three images above were explorations before arriving at the final data visualization. An extensive workshop with Prof. John T. Stasko on data visualization was the most insightful and memorable during this project
Alternate solutions for the wearable heart rate monitor, were presented as interactive prototype since we were part of R&D set up at Samsung.
The working prototype earned us the best demo of the year at Samsung apart from establishing the value of design process to define the business goals with focus on users. Our research work led to another problem definition and a research project - “ to enhance data entry by clinicians” . The challenges are huge (ethics procedures, getting access and emotional demands) and so is the impact of the solution.