Process Update: Saturday, March 24

Adella Guo, Caroline Hermans, Jesse Wilson, Joy Xiaonan Chen, Adena Lin

Secondary Research

The very first day we met as a group, we brainstormed a list of topics that could be useful for research. We came up with five topics, and that night we each did preliminary research on one of the areas.

1. Asthma medicine and medical issues
2. Asthma triggers
3. Restrictions on daily life, kids’ perspective
4. Dealing with asthma as a caregiver
5. Competitive analysis

Secondary Research Summary

To start, we each developed research on our individual categories.

Asthma Medication:

• Long-term control: daily medications and inhalers
• Quick-relief control: quick-relief inhaler
• Allergy medications: injections
• Bronchial thermoplasty: treatment of last resort
• Create asthma action plan with doctor

Triggers:

• Common allergens: pollen, dust mites, molds, animal dander, cockroach droppings
• Common irritants: perfumes, air pollution, cleaning products, smoke and fires
• Other causes: exercise, cold weather, dry weather, anxiety/stress, viral or bacterial infections

Restrictions on daily life:

• Activities: sports, other physically active and demanding activities
• Social and emotional impact
• Environment: no furry pets, no cigarette smoke
• Dependence on medication
• Missing class, can be hard to keep up

Caregiver’s point of view:

• Parental responsibilities
• Finances: can be very financially demanding
• Transportation to take care of child
• Missing work to deal with flare-ups
• Distress: stress in daily life, worrying about child
• Caregiving activities: preventing stress and helping to care for the child medically

Kid’s perspective:

• Emotional support in parent-child relationship: young children don’t recognize warning symptoms of an asthma attack
• Awareness: children recognize meds through color and shape of the product
• Doctor/family relationship: must talk with doctor to make a plan
• Peer to peer relationship: kids get teased about having asthma
• Social bullying: asthma makes kids feel different than friends
• Physical activity limitation

Competitive analysis

• American Lung Association: Medical Education
• Healthy Homes: In-Home Program
• Breathing Association: In-Home Program
• Allergy Asthma Network: Connects patients to support networks of doctors and other patients
• Georgia dept of public health: Online education
• Asthma camps

Presenting to each other

Initial Findings

Questions we had, and areas that we were particularly interested in

Challenges

After our initial brainstorm, we came up with a list of things we wanted to know more about. As a group, it seemed like our interests were converging on the societal and emotional struggles that children with asthma face. We came up with a plan for over Spring Break, where each of us would post on a different Asthma forum online asking about problems that people with Asthma face.

Unfortunately, this was a bit of a dead end. Not only did few people respond to our questions, a lot of our posts were banned because researchers were not allowed to post.

Finally, still, we felt that we had enough secondary research to get started on some interesting project ideas.

Diagram of secondary research findings

Brainstorming

Now we had some good initial foundation for understanding the problem space that exists around Asthma. At this point, we had a massive brainstorming session and came up with some ideas for potential projects. To give an idea of how many ideas we had: all the bright blue post-its are from the brainstorming session!

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Together, we narrowed it down to five big project ideas:

1. School consulting. We propose a service that works with a school, and work with them to develop solutions for struggling Asthmatic students.
2. Buddy System. Everyone loves having companionship, and often children with asthma are isolated from their peers. We propose a service that pairs up buddies who have asthma, and forges a lasting relationship between them. This could be through an older/younger child in-school relationship, or even some sort of Pen Pal system. By developing these relationships, asthma could be more manageable.
3. Custom Inhaler. From phone cases, to shoe designs, to even video game controllers, customization creates a unique sense of ownership. We propose a service where children can customize and design their own asthma inhalers. Perhaps if there were this attachment between the child and their medical device, having one wouldn’t be so bad. “I used to want to break my arm because I thought having a cast looked so cool” — could having Asthma look “cool” too?
4. In-Home Test Kit. Many of the Asthma services we encountered in our competitive analysis had a person come into the family’s home and give advice on how to make it less irritating to the child. We propose a service where the family is shipped all of the testing things they need, and they can then send the results back and have them analyzed.
5. Communication Systems. When a child has Asthma, it can be difficult for the teachers, doctors, and parents to all stay on the same page. We propose a service that can link these parties together, and allow teachers and parents to view doctors notes and important information easily.

We then narrowed down all of our ideas by voting on which ones we liked the best.

In the end, the most people were excited about the Buddy System and the Custom Inhaler idea.

What’s Next?

Now that we have these two ideas, we’ll have to talk a lot more about which ideas seem more valuable. Now is definitely the time for us to reach out to teachers, children, and parents, and get their insights on our ideas. We’ll reach out to the Children’s Center at CMU, and also develop some interview questions, sketches, and potentially paper prototypes to show them and get their feedback.

3/28/17: Primary Research Plan

Today we spent class time addressing who we need to talk to in order to gain insight into the best direction to move forward with. We did the following to help us narrow down the main stakeholders for our service design proposal.

Stakeholder Map

Stakeholders we would like to interview:

• Children’s Center
• Teachers, Doctors, Pediatricians, Children’s Psychologist

Email Structure:

One of the emails we sent to a Director and Psychology Professor at CMU’s Children’s School

Collaborative Tools we started using:

• WhenIsGood.net
• Mural

3/29/17: Ideation Discussion

Today, we met to interpret an interview that Caroline had done with Lena, a previous kindergarten school teacher. She was very helpful and we gained several insights:

• Communication is broken between parents and teachers (and other people in the school system such as coaches or substitute teachers) about the child’s asthma care.
• Teachers often spend a whole year with a child with asthma, but then that knowledge is not transferable to other teachers or adults that the child may interact with.
• Children want to be treated like all the other kids, without being singled out for their asthma.
• Teachers sometimes don’t know how to deal with an asthma attack, or are unaware of a child’s asthma triggers.
• Kids are receptive to engaging presentations about asthma (for example, using a teddy bear to demonstrate how to use an inhaler).
• There is a communication gap between children and adults; adults aren’t aware that kids can express themselves!
• Asthma is like any other illness that needs to be talked about to destigmatize it or else children and adults will develop a bias.

From this, we thought of three problem spaces with potential ideas that we want to explore.

1. Communication about kids with asthma: Application or website that details student health conditions so that all stakeholders can be informed of the child’s asthma.
2. Normalizing asthma: provide consulting services that range from inclusive lesson plans to workshops that teach classrooms about asthma.
3. Empowering children with asthma: allow kids to create custom designs for their inhaler and create personalized comics.

Although the first problem is very real, it focuses more on the communication between adults and it is hard to encourage use of the application or website. Moving forward, we have decided to focus on normalizing asthma and empowering children with asthma.