Empathy Lens -Redefining relations in healthcare
By Karolina Malara, Jelte Knossen and Hyun Jin Shin
Introduction
What will healthcare look like in 2030? What should future healthcare look like from a design perspective?
Medical technologies are developing every day, and individuals are increasingly interested in their health and well-being. In turn, digital apps and wearable devices that manage an individual’s data are also becoming increasingly popular.
In the midst of this increase of interest, this healthcare project began with the problem of medical coverage for the increasing elderly population in the rural area of Västerbotten. In order to solve this demographic change and bridging large distances, digital technologies have emerged as alternatives. A lot of solutions using digital technologies like telemedicine have been studied and applied in the real world before COVID-19 pandemic, we were lucky enough to see them first hand in the fieldtrip to Storuman county.
However, most of the healthcare products and services that have been studied so far are for patients, while those for medical professionals have not been discussed much.
In this project, we looked at distance spanning health care for medical professionals from a design perspective. We would like to introduce the journey of solving this huge discourse and the design results through the process of empathy lens.
Process
Overall, we repeated the diamond process of expanding and narrowing ideas. The reason being, we felt it was of importance to look into all the stakeholders in order to focus and choose the right values from different perspectives to design for.
In this process, based on individual experience, the roles and feelings of doctors, nurses, and patients were shared. Journey maps of hospital treatment were created to find new opportunities and problems of current healthcare and to map relevant values.
Through this process of spreading and organizing our findings, we created our vision for which we wished to design.
Based on our vision, we defined the CORE values that our concept needed to adhere to.
Ideations with tangible media — “Hi! My name is Steve, and I am a doctor”
After the fieldtrip, the next step in the design process was ideation by using tangible tools e.g., post-it notes, blocks of paper, and markers. To find the problem we would like to solve in our project design, instead of talking, we started drawing and storytelling. Inspired by the trip to Storuman, we were thinking about the real needs and problems that doctors and patients from the rural areas are facing.
Because our project was aimed at professional products, we decided to focus our project from a doctor’s perspective. We created a story about the daily routine of the doctor named Steve. This story was an imagination of how a typical day in remote healthcare might look like, based on our own experiences and our trip to Storuman. Steve became our persona for who we started to create a product. Thanks to telling a story about Steve in the first-person narrative we were able to empathize better with the doctor’s point of view, than we would typically have done.
Setting Vision — Vision of the garden
By using the same storytelling approach as a tool, we created an alternative and abstract story about how the daily routine of Steve’s work might look like if instead of doing his normal routine he would be going to a place called the garden.
In this vision Steve instead of being a doctor, becomes a gardener who attentively observes his plants. His role is to take care of them, water them, and give help whenever needed. Plants in the garden are metaphore of th relation patients have with the doctor, they are located and growing in the garden, so they are not appearing there only when they are sick but are continuously being cared for.
Starting from this point we described what kind of feelings the garden should provide patients. One of the most important feelings that we wanted to awake is that the garden should be a place where doctors and patients might create a relationship built on trust and security.
Through this manifestation of our vision, we want to create products for healthcare that:
· Focuses on disease prevention rather than treating sickness
· Ensures continuity of treatment
· Provides a sense of security and care
From Vision to Concept — first prototypes
A garden metaphor illustrates an alternative approach to healthcare and the medical process as well as the doctor-patient relationship. Based on this vision, we considered how to transform this metaphor into design. Our first step was to determine what kind of factors we need to consider when we are prototyping our ideas. Firstly, we wanted to design from the perspective of the doctor. Secondly, we showed many patients, but with an emphasis that each patient is different. Thirdly, the garden/product should provide an overview of the patient’s condition. Fourthly, it gives the patient detailed information through specific interaction.
Based on these factors, we started wondering how a product might look like. We decided to create our prototypes in a tangible way because by interacting with an object, we can understand it with all our senses.
We used the same pattern in all our prototypes: one object represented each patient, and all the patients were grouped. However, our prototypes distinguished a different type of interaction and language of communication about patient health conditions.
In the first prototype patients present as pawns moving on the chessboard. Specified localization gives an overview of the patient’s health condition. Pressing a single object yields detailed information regarding him/her.
Prototype no. 2 shows each patient as a medallion that rotates at different rates depending on their health status. Interaction with the model relies on touching and moving a patient’s sphere to the reader. By doing these interactions the doctor has access to detailed data.
In the third prototype, patients’ health status is communicated by the light of varying intensities, movements, and colors. An interaction process was proposed by touching and embracing each form. The details about a patient can be read by touching the sphere.
Based on our tests with fellow students, we found prototype no.3 to be the most suitable for what we want to convey. Using light to discuss health conditions gives us a lot of exciting possibilities to explore. This language of communication offers a sensory experience on different layers and compared to interaction by touching seemed to be very interesting for us to develop. We began discussing how changing the light might give us an overview of the patient’s condition and how this could help doctors develop empathy.
From prototype to product.
From these initial ideas we started to finalize our concept by taking good aspects of the different ideas and combining them into one.
To convey the concept in the best way, the idea was that we would create one proof of concept prototype and one aesthetic prototype. The proof of concept tried to mimic the interactions and look of the interactive elements (as seen above), while the aesthetic prototype tried to mimic only the shape and dimensions of the device.
How does it work?
1. Patient
The patient gets an empathy lens from the doctor. This lens allows the doctor to measure the patients vitals, in this case we opted for a specialized lens for people with bipolar disorder. This means that in this case the lens measures activity, sleep, and mood since these vitals are key to understanding manic and depressed states.
Activity and sleep are measured by sensors detecting motion and gps location, pickup times, etc. while the mood cannot be measured by sensors. This is why the patient self-monitors this. the patient does this by squeezing the device and through this getting a prompt from their phone to indicate what they are feeling.
2. Doctor
The doctor has a copy of each of his/her patients on his desk in the form of a lens. Underneath the lenses you will find the garden/device containing each patient. The doctor sees its patients data in an instance since all the data gathered is visualized in one way or another. For example, sleeping data is visualized by intensity of the light, activity is visualized by the speed of the movement of the light, and mood is visualized by a colour gradient. Each ellipse shows up to 4 days of mood data. When a new emotion is mapped by the patient, a new colour will appear at the appropriate location and merge with the gradient. This gives the doctor a quick overview of how all its patients are doing and which might need a little bit more attention. It also allows the doctor to continuously be aware of its patients statuses and thus have a better understanding of them.
EmpathyLens and Healthcare 2030
EmpathyLens aims to convey two meanings as follows.
First, EmpathyLens shows the process of visualizing a concept that originated from a vision in the design process.
Next, we focused on changing the relationship between doctors and patients.We often focus on creating new products or services by starting from the problems of any product or services. However, we tried to provide a service design that newly sees the relationship between doctors and patients. The relationships between them should be more interactive than the relationship of service provider and recipient.
Through this empathetic tool, doctors will be able to easily check the patients’ condition with a holistic view and continuously connect the relationship with the patients. Patients will feel stable and relieved through relationships with doctors.
We expect that this device will further help treat chronic patients from fragmentary and passive relationships to interactive relationships between doctors and patients in future healthcare.
