KenoAssist, when a design meets care
I am a designer, it is a job I love, and a career I am passionate about. I used to believe that I wanted to design pretty things that everyone would look at and think “that looks nice”. I spent so long focusing on the “nice” looking things I rejected to believe I could have a solution to a problem that my own family have experience with, as do countless other families— communication in the care sector.
In 2015 my grandad passed away after months of illness. Prior to his passing long periods of time was spent in hospital, returning to my family home between treatment and more serious illness. During this time I was having to make two trips to the hospital on a regular basis as he had ran out of clean clothing, needed razor blades or even that he didn’t eat any food and I had to go get him a chocolate eclair to make sure he had something to eat. If I had of known he needed something before I went I would have had longer to talk to my grandad.
It was difficult to talk to care staff and doctors to understand what was going on, as a result the camera roll on my phone was filled with photos of his charts. I googled medical terminology frantically to try and understand what was going on. This was not down to healthcare staff not caring, it was due to the overworked and understaffed issues that we constantly hear about. After my grandad passed away I got a job working as a care assistant and I started to notice that this was not a problem only my family encountered, and it wasn’t restricted to hospital settings, it was in care homes, day centres and care in the community providers.
I have a vast amount of experience dealing with staff working in healthcare, and I have also been that member of staff — and whilst I study I still am. I see issues first hand and I understand the pressures everyone involved in care have to deal with on a daily basis, be it family and friends of a loved one who has just entered into a nursing home, or the member of staff trying their best to help them adapt to their new living space.
I started to recognise a common problem, communication, and the lack of time available to communicate. Staff have timeframes to stick to and a stressful environment where safety and care comes at the heart of every task they carry out, yet there’s a noise in the background of every step, of every client needing fed, of every pad being changed. The sound of a phone. That is how communication occurs in a care setting. We can login to snapchat and see exactly where our friends are on a map, we can send a text and ask “what’s up” and we even have the power to see the amount of steps and calories our friends consume on fitness apps. However, we do not know how a loved one in care is. This situation is common, and regardless of how we think about it, we are stretching staff further with added stress of phone calls and we are adding pressure to family members concerned about a loved one when that call cannot be answered.
I have just one question — why is communication so bad in care?
Companies have tried to implement software that records information, yet very few pass this information onto family and friends, and those that do only offer a quick summary of what happened that day. These solutions are mainly aimed at the care in the community audience. Yet we neglect the vast amount of other care sectors that are missing out on a massive communication tool that we each hold in our pockets.
KenoAssist Offers Change and Transparency
I am a strong believer in those who have experienced a problem are the best suited to solve a problem, and that’s exactly what KenoAssist does. KenoAssist is a native application for iOS and Android that healthcare staff record information on clients into, and family and friends can login and access the information. You can set up alerts in particular areas so that a notification will come through if new information is entered. Care assistants and nurses can enter information throughout the day, in a similar way as to how it would be recorded on paper, only digitally and then family and friends can open the app and see the information at their fingertips! No more trying to phone to find out if your loved one needs socks brought up, or if they ate their breakfast. Everybody wins!
KenoAssist is in the early stages of design and development. Throughout the coming weeks I will be recording various research, UI developments, testing and development on this blog. This application has the potential to revolutionise communication in healthcare as well as reduce the use of paper, create more reliable records that cannot be lost or damaged and drastically reduce the likelihood of handwriting being illegible. I want to combat the most common problems and offer a solution that can improve workflow for staff, whilst adding a high level of communication for family and friends. We are living in the age of digital devices at our fingertips, it’s time to bring technology into healthcare.
