Week 7

// reflection on mid-semester presentations

After the dry run on Friday, we decided to add a slide explaining the gaps in the current product market and a few additional slides that dive deeper into potential concepts. This proved to be useful as we received a lot of feedback regarding these slide contents.

For the product market slide, we emphasized the fact that current solutions attempt to solve the problem of situational anxiety by promoting a patient to self relationship. Whereas we wanted to consider the possibility of a patient to patient relationship as a potential direction.

In concluding our presentation, we wanted to provide more concrete examples of product directions. We took our “how might we” questions and proposed rough concepts for some of the major overlaps in situational anxiety, emotional isolation, and the physical environment of the exam room.

For the question of “How might we connect patients to others who share their experiences?” a potential solution could be a method of showing patients in isolated exam rooms the presence of other patients in the same situation. We also proposed that this concept could employ existing technology in the exam room as a digital interface.

For the question of “how might we facilitate patients’ transitions into a new space?” a product opportunity could be an object that travels with the patient throughout their journey and adapts and changes to the context. This object could then be contributed to a participatory sculpture where the patient can reflect on their own experience as well as connect with the experiences of others.

Feedback:

Deepan said that he liked our approach of starting with a child’s experiences and applying that to others. But he recommended that instead of viewing from the lens of age differences, we should view the problem from the lens of differing cognitive and physical abilities, as those are not age dependent.

He also stated that there is a lot of existing research connecting situational anxiety to PTSD, which he suggested we look into as well.

Deepan raised some concerns about the product concept that travels with the patient journey, as transition from pre-op to post-op might not be feasible and we would need to consider disinfection and cleaning processes.

Finally, he noted that he liked the patient to patient approach to building community and connection as it is one that is often overlooked by hospitals.

Peter said that he liked the idea of showing patients the experience of other patients through a game (referencing the first idea) and that it would be interesting to communicate the where they are in their personal clinic / hospital journey as part of the sharing experience.

Kristen said that the idea of an object that evolves over time is an elegant way of expressing the patient journey. In relation to the first idea, she thought it was interesting that the patient to patient connection could be established without direct communication and proposed using color as a form of communication.

Next steps:

For next steps, we definitely want to understand the broader range of physical and cognitive abilities of patients that will be visiting the clinic. We also plan to do more secondary research into the connection between situational anxiety and PTSD as Deepan suggested. Finally, we plan on exploring more concepts based on our “how might we” venn diagram and pushing our current ideas farther based on the feedback we received.