SugarCare | App for Diabetic Patients’ health tracking and doctor interaction.

Project By: Stacy Carvalho, Vidhitulsyan, Sreelakshmiwarrier, & Aman Jaiswal

SUGARCARE is a project focusing on developing an app that can help diabetes patients keep track of their condition and connect to their doctor. We began our journey with Philips by discussing with our mentors, possible areas we could look at in the healthcare industry.

Mind Map #1

We started with a simple Mind Map revolving around a patient’s health and listed down all possible tangible and intangible aspects of the same. Diseases and Conditions, Treatments for the same, Insurance, Devices used, Services, and Documentation were main themes that popped up while Affinity Mapping.

Process

Before we proceeded further our mentors introduced us to the Philips Design Co-Create Process that they follow:

Secondary Research — Phase 1

From our Affinity Map above we then decided to choose one area. Documentation is usually a bigger problem than we think. On selecting that to be our theme we then went into the Secondary Research Phase. We made a transactional Map to better understand the flow of information, products and services using the information we collected during the research phase.

This made us realize that the patient has more than just documentation to take care of and a patient with a complex medical history would have way too many documents to scan and save into an app so we then decided to go back to the drawing board and look at just one particular disease/condition. We choose Diabetes, Heart diseases, and Pregnancy, and then by vote and research conducted we decided to go with diabetes.

Secondary Research — Phase 2

These were some key pointers during our secondary research that convinced us to choose this topic:

Mind Map #2

This time we made a Mind Map on Diabetes specifically to look at all the areas we should venture into while doing our primary and secondary research and not just look at it from our original idea’s perspective of documentation but everything as a whole. We then clubbed them into buckets like symptoms, awareness, causes, treatments, experiences, devices, myths, attitudes, tests, and finally stakeholders which helped us highlight who we should be interviewing to get more primary data.

Primary Research: Interviews

We conducted 30+ interviews with Doctors, and Patients, as well as a few of their family members and care-takers. We then went onto making note of our key dialogues during these interviews and then clustered them into buckets to pick up on emerging themes.

Below are the main themes that we noted during the affinity clustering of our verbatims with the stakeholders. Ones topping the list being documentation, Relationship with the Doctor, Diabetes and other diseases, their views on Diet and lifestyle choices.

Inferences & Insights

We then went onto deriving inferences from which we then drew our key insights.

1. Trust — The dedication of the patient towards the treatment heavily depended on their trust and experience in the doctor.
2. Documentation — Although manageable when isn’t all available the lack of it can definitely add stress, panic, and even inconsistent diagnosis.
3. Negative Reminders — About how life-threatening it can be brought fear along with a sense of stress. Bringing me to the next point, stress. Repeatedly being found that it was the root of all evil.
4. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle + proper diet played a key role in their improvement.
5. And finally, the Lack of Knowledge leads to negligence further leading to chronic diseases.

Personas

Noticing the interviews and the repetition of the type of patients, we divided our interviewees into two major personas.

Empathy Map

Journey Map

HMW Statement

On conducting all the above research we finally came up with our Problem Statement:

“How might we design a tool for diabetics so that they can have more control over their condition while keeping their stress levels down?”

Ideation

Next, we came up with 35 ideas in our ideation phase which were broadly divided into 5 clusters.

We further did a DVF to narrow down to the final 6 ideas and then to the final solution.

Final Solution

The app facilitates seamless communication between the doctor and patients, enabling remote medical support and consultation while providing the patients with a place to store all their health-related documents and track their health covering our main insights. Apart from consultation, using the app, in general, reduces the in-clinic time of the patients and reduces the stress and mishaps that arise while handling files, reports, prescriptions, etc. An app like this would also come in handy in a pandemic situation like COVID-19.

Storyboard

We made a quick storyboard to understand the flow of information and interaction the patients might have on using such an app.

Goals

We then went onto list down the goals of both our personas to form a better Information Architecture.

Information Architecture

Finally, we went to brand the app along with design the UI. To have a look at the entire app and its feature in detail click on the link below:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/96809641/Sugarcare-Diabetes-Treatment-Management-App

What did we learn?

The entire process was extensive. Designing this experience came with its learnings but also a lot of challenges. We were lucky enough to find supportive mentors and peers who helped us throughout the process. In the initial phase of the project, we faced difficulty finding the right problem and contextualizing it. At times we also found ourselves tangled between all the information and research material gathered, but the key to it was constantly taking feedbacks and setting deadlines so that the project keeps moving. It wasn't linear at all but looking back that was the best part. It made us antsy on whether we would pull off a successful project. Lastly, we learned a lot about teamwork and how it can help give a different perspective to the project.

What's Next?

Looking at the current situation with Covid-19 we realized that an app like this would highly benefit the health industry. We hope to develop it in the future, get our designs tested with the users, and keep iterating the IA as we only took it through 3 revisions at the most. Overall, we would probably also expand it to more than just diabetes and incorporate all other diseases and illnesses instead.

Thank you for reading. :)