Final Presentation
May 7th, 2019, Downtown Pittsburgh, U.S. Steel Building
First, we want to thanks to our professor, Stacie, for advising us on this project the whole semester long and helping us step by step, from learning theories, to design and prototyping, and to final presentation and documentation.
Today we have our final presentation at UPMC, downtown Pittsburgh. We were excited and we did it! It was great that we can also talk with doctors and staff at UPMC directly who are more familiar with the readmission issue and our targeted disease — Inflammatory bowel disease.
FINAL PRESENTATION :)
WHAT IS BENTO :O
Bento is a toolkit that helps IBD patients to learn their new diets on an interactive website during inpatient and keep track of their diets with a personalized food journal.
INVESTIGATING PROBLEMS
Our team identified current challenges that people with chronic illnesses face that can lead to readmission into medical facilities. We learned which demographics are most affected by specific chronic illnesses and are likely to benefit from a designed learning experience, when the problems are most prevalent, and the contexts where the problems most often reside. This information helped us frame design opportunity spaces.
Through research, we identified that the current problems with IBD include:
- The disease is complicated and the patient often overwhelmed by the information in the beginning
- It is difficult for patients to follow the new diet plan In the real-life context
- Patients lack the motivation to stick with the new diet plan
To address these problems, we have designed Bento to help newly diagnosed IBD patients to overcome these difficulties, and the learning happens both during Inpatient and post-discharge.
IDENTIFYING LEARNING GOALS AND GAPS
We described the characteristics of preferred states where we imagine problems as eradicated. Our team then determined the types of gaps that emerged, which directed our focus in defining our teaching goals.
DEFINING TEACHING GOALS
Based on our framing of current and preferred states, our team defined what we aim to teach our audience in an effort to address the learning gaps that emerged. We believe that by targeting our teaching goals we will create learning experiences that lead our audience to preferred states:
- Newly diagnosed IBD patients have enough knowledge of what foods are safe to eat and what should be avoided.
- Patients can apply their knowledge to different situations in life
- Support patients properly to make sure they could succeed in the challenges.
GROUNDING DESIGN APPROACHES
After we established our teaching goals and learning goals for our audience, our team sought to leverage sound principles that comprise learning theories. We used relevant theories as structural bases for our learning concepts and to inform the design of their facets.
Overarching Theories 01: Structured Flow of Goals
To address the learning gaps, we first set our structured flow of goals. Our long-term goal is to help the patient achieve a state where they have full control over their diet, our designed learning experience focused on the short-term, know concepts, and intermediate goals, deal with real-life cases in real life, and through intervals of learning experience and keeping a diary to help achieve long term goal.
Overarching Theories 02: Learning Flow Model
We design 4 activities in online learning during in-patient. We used the learning flow model as the guiding principle for designing the modules of the learning experience to provide continued support and gradual challenges.
Overarching Theories 03: Learning Flow Model
The learning modules overall also followed the 4MAT system, taking the learners through the principles of food choices (why) — the instances (what) — the scenario (how does it work) and the application (what if?)
CONCEPTUAL MODEL
SCENARIO
PROTOTYPE
Part 1 — During In-patient learning activities:
Onboarding
Activity One — Learn Diet Principle
Description: Based on the diet recommendations the patient entered, the system will present a series of food cards, when hovering over, the patient can see if the food fits the high-level principle and how possible it is to induce a flare; the patient can favorite the safer food that he/she likes.
Learning Goal: To reinforce the high-level principles with some examples in order for the patient to contextualize the principles given; build expectancy that there are foods the patient can still enjoy that are relatively safe.
Activity Two — Arrange Foods by Nutrition Content
Description: This activity presents more instances of food that more or less of the nutrition component the patient is supposed to pay attention to (e.g. high protein, low fiber); the patient will first arrange the food based on nutrition content, and then adjust their answer based on system feedback.
Learning Goal: To help the patient apply the diet principles to more instances of food in order to practice the principles and make it transferable to more real-life situations.
For the card flipping activity, we also designed a physical version, to facilitate discussions between nurses and patients about their diets.
Activity Three — Dining scenarios
Description: The patient will be presented with more complicated dining choices that require the patient to utilize the principles they have already learned and applied comprehensively. The system will provide prompt feedback and reasons for why certain choices are beneficial or not.
Learning Goal: To help the patient apply the diet principles to more complicated real-life situations; to learn about.
Activity Four — Plan Balanced Meal
Description: The setting is when the patient is in remission when the patient is supposed to try eating more varieties of food and supplement the nutrition lost during flare periods. The patient will be asked to plan balanced meals with sufficient calorie and they can favorite those combinations.
Learning Goal: To help the patient learn how to plan balanced meals and supplement their nutrition intake during remission.
Part 2— Post Discharge, using a food journal
ANALYSIS OF LEARNING EXPERIENCE
What we did well
First of all, our learning experiences/activities are very well based on the learning theories we have learned throughout this semester. Whenever we felt uncertain about the design of a certain learning activity, we use the learning theories as guidance and justifications.
Second, we have a really rich set of learning activities both during in-patient, as well as a tool patients can use post-discharge.
The food journal could also help create better communications between patients and their doctors in the future physical check-ups.
The personalization part will work effectively for IBD given the specificity of IBD symptoms differs a lot among different people.
What we can improve:
In the future, we want to even consider how to streamline all the activities and avoid causing the feeling of complexity of the learning experience.
POTENTIAL NEXT STEPS
- Regarding the implementation method, besides our current thoughts on how to implement it, which is online interactive learning plus physical food journal, according to our ideation testing session, we also realized that some people (especially young people) prefer more on using an app rather than going online for the learning activity. It was also brought up that using the physical food journal at home is a great idea, however, using the physical journal in a public environment may cause embarrassment. We also proposed an alternative way of implementation which is using an app through the time in-patient and post-discharge. The content and activities will be exactly the same, the only changes are the implementation and format of the diary.
Alternative scenario is:
Regarding the two ways of implementation — Website plus physical journal OR Native App, we’re still not sure which is a more preferred way by a larger demographic population and we will continue conducting research on this.
2. We also want to test the effectiveness of our designed learning experience. Due to time constraints and our recourse limitations, other than doing literature reviews, asking questions and checking patients discussions on Reddit, we were not able to directly communicate with IBD patients. In the future, we want to talk to IBD patients and test the learning experience with them, for the purposes of testing the effectiveness of our designed learning experience.
Reference:
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