Designing for Children with Asthma: First Progress Presentation

Ecosystem Collection

We kicked off our project by collectively coming up with an ecosystem chart of children with asthma and related stakeholders, ideas, locations, and goals. We organized them into the following chart.

Value Flow Diagram — Early Stage

Based on what we had in the ecosystem collection, we moved around stakeholders and activities and create a early stage of value flow diagram. The diagram helped us clarify domains and stakeholders that we can potentially focus on.

Question Storming for Interview Questions

We then looked at compiling a set of questions that we felt was important. We then voted so that we have important questions for our interviews. This also allowed our team to get on the same page.

Secondary Research Insights

Research Findings

• There are different types of asthma
• Some children manipulate their parents with their asthma.
• Current ways of tracking symptoms is cumbersome.
• Young children can’t communicate with parents, and don’t know that they should communicate.
• Work is missed by parents who need to take care of kids

Potential interests:

• Support groups
• Education through books and movies
• Aspiration to educate and lift stigma
• Keep kids connected, what is the best way to talk to parents vs. kids. vs. doctors
• Ways to provide care through other kids
• Communication to others

Primary Research ( 3 Interviews) Research Insights

Assumptions we had:

• There is a stigma around asthma, in that children with asthma are frail.
• Parents are more helicopter parents because of fear of child having an asthma attack when alone.
• The first asthma attack is traumatizing.

We have interviewed 3 people who had asthma as children.

• Asthma isn’t a very stigmatized issue, especially with children. There are many different types of inhalers that one person may use. There is always some sort of initial panic.
• There are different ways to approach and treat asthma in children. For eg. a parent mention about how 3 of her children and asthma at different ages and how it was all managed differently. Allergy vs Allergy induced. Different management ways.
• Asthma may not be stigmatized among children, but the use of the inhaler is in some ways. i.e. only using an inhaler if no one is around.
• People always think of asthma as a situational event, but in reality it’s a long term effect that may resurface at any time.
• Children feel that it is something that everyone experiences and is not unique to them.
• A parent’s role is to make sure their children are prepared with their meds on them. The role of school is to make sure the children go through with using their meds.

Different inhalers for immediate relief and preventing attacks

Areas of interest:

• Communication between different stakeholders- ie primary care providers and secondary care providers.
• Education for first time attacks
• Connecting people who have knowledge of asthma

Journey Map

We drew out a journey map to understand see what kids with asthma go through. It helped us see the ways in which customers go about achieving their needs and to understand customers’ experiences throughout the full cycle of interactions. However, we realized that we should ask the people who went through the full cycle to draw it out to see how different each person’s experiences are. So later in the process, we plan to conduct a generative research by asking them to draw out the full cycle, and the emotional stages.

Intended Service Propositions

We brainstormed 19 Service Propositions and talked about what we liked in each. These were then used to inform our scenarios. We created storyboards based on the ones we were interested in and voted for our top three.

Key Service propositions:

1. Our service is a mentor service that connects recent asthma diagnosed children to adults who had asthma when they were kids to help them understand this new condition and guide them with it.
2. Our service is a system that helps identify the best way to deal with different types of asthma for children.
3. Our service is a tool that provides a portable Emergency Medical Record that primary and secondary care providers can view and manage.

Scenarios

Brainstormed 8 storyboards for initial ideas

Themes of interest

• Community Support
• Streamline Communication
• Personalized medicine with a holistic bent

Value Flow Diagram

Data in Our Service

For proposition 1:

• Using kids location to recommend people around them, kids with and without asthma

For proposition 2&3:

• Visualize and manage emergency medical record which both primary and secondary caregivers can input and have access that data
• What types of medical record data are out there
• Ways to manage and visualize them for easy usage
• Location that people may need to access the data:
• Asthma emergency departments visit: https://dphhs.mt.gov/Portals/85/publichealth/documents/Epidemiology/MTHDDS/Special%20Reports/AsthmaEmergencyDepartmentVisits.pdf
• Location of schools

Key Questions

• Does asthma treatment differ as much as we think it does?
• Are children willing to participate in an asthma mentorship program?
• What kinds of medical protocols are there regarding medical files?
• What is the protocol teachers follow to communicate a child’s asthma attack?

Next Steps

• Talking to more children and their parents, and teachers
• Testing out the storyboards we have — speed dating
• Validate our journey map