GOAL

To design concepts for enhanced experiences revolving around blood pressure management using digital services and connected product interventions among patients in the age range of 65 to 80 years old.

CONTEXT

Note: This is a collaboration project between an organization and my university, Savannah College of Art and Design through a program called SCADpro.

Currently, Philips healthcare has a product family for blood pressure management that they wanted to enhance through improvements in the product-service ecosystem. Typically, a hypertension patient is never an individual player. Their ecosystem consists of caregivers, family members, medical professionals, and devices.

In order to provide an end-to-end care experience or the patient and other key stakeholders in this journey, our end solution of a product-service system proved to be the right toolkit to alleviate a patient’s home experience.

EMPATHIZE

As a team of a total of 16 students tackling a broad subject of blood pressure management, we created four different subgroups of 4 individuals each, focusing on key parameters for the topic, namely:

1. Lifestyle
2. Access to care
3. Awareness
4. Management

Being a part of the access group, I studied the different methods that patients and caregivers were using to monitor health.
In order to help improve the regular monitoring process as a touchpoint in this journey, it was important to understand what pains they faced. This included physical pains, psychological barriers or misconceptions, surrounding influences, ergonomic comfort, and motivation.

DEFINE

A variety of techniques like blue ocean strategy, competitor analysis, affinity mapping, and brainstorming were used to identify key insights and opportunities for us to create an elevated care experience.

As mentioned earlier, it was crucial for us to consider a family of products and services in order to touch different pain points and aspects of the patient journey.

IDEATE

Keeping in mind the ecosystem that we were looking to create, our final deliverable was a subscription-based toolkit of services and blood pressure monitoring devices, some direct and some assistive.

Note: Due to a non-disclosure agreement signed with Philips healthcare, the details of the solution cannot be disclosed.

PROTOTYPE

Initial mockups were created using blue and pink foam to decide the forms. Based on ergonomic ease, the forms were modified to create high fidelity prototypes. We prototyped the monitoring devices in our in-house 3D printing lab at SCAD.

USER TESTING

We tested some of our prototypes and cardboard mockups for the application with some blood pressure management patients.
Their feedback was documented and improvements were thereafter recommended.

TAKEAWAYS

Research around medical topics often comes with many sensitivities. It also comes with a lack of access to medical professionals, results, and any official medical data in hospitals. We had to think on our feet and identify the best environments where we could get first-hand information from caregivers and older patients. Roundabouts and alternative solutions fed our research!

Another takeaway was the design of products is heavily influenced by your niche market, especially when designed for special sections like infants, medical environments, patients or seniors. Small details can significantly affect usability. So it is important to study the users and current products thoroughly in order to create a solution that best caters to their needs.