Week 2: Defining Service Proposition
Flow Diagram
In order to identify potential intervention points, we decided to map an asthma journey from symptom discovery and visiting the doctor to learning of an asthma diagnosis and creating and maintaining a management plan.
Based on our research findings, we decided to map the journey of 4 key stakeholders:
- Children under 5
- Child over 5
- Parents
- Physician
This process illuminated that there is a really interesting ‘trial and error’ period of about 4–6 weeks where a physician is relying on careful monitoring and reporting of symptoms and responses to medication by the parent and patient in order to confirm or rule-out an asthma diagnosis. This process can be especially critical in children under 5 because, as discovered in our desk research, certain lab tests cannot be used and so a physician’s diagnosis relies almost entirely on qualitative information.
From here we began to characterize problems and emotions that each stakeholder might have during this segment of the journey map:
- A parent might not be sure if their child really has asthma or not and may be stressed or worried by that degree of uncertainty
- Doctor may not have enough information to give proper diagnosis and/or the parent or child may not be able to effectively monitor symptoms
- Parent and child have to manually collect data on child’s symptoms
Brainstorming HMW Questions
Excited by the potential service opportunities within diagnostic trial and error period, we began brainstorming “How Might We” statements to explore further:
- How might we support the doctor and parent in confirming/disproving the diagnosis and learning to setup a longer term management plan? Avoid misdiagnosis?
- How might we collect the data between the symptom tracking stage and the diagnosis stage? (and reduce the possibility of misdiagnosis?)
- How might we look at the managing emotions around asthma and asthma attacks? Emotions around not knowing diagnosis? Emotions post diagnosis?
- How might we design a management system that supports the diversity of management approaches… that can be personalized by kids/parents?
- How does asthma treatment move to habituated behaviors? How might we support the transition to habituated behaviors for long term management?
Potential ecosystem components
Based on these HMW statements and inspired by the Philips childhood MRI project, we began to explore possible service ecosystem components, summarized below.
- Framing the trial diagnosis period as an “adventure” or storybook for a kid, where they are finding clues and solving a mystery in conjunction with efforts by the parent and doctor to track symptoms. This could include (a) physical storybook to be filled out with parents and (b) an exam room within an asthma specialists office mimics the adventure storybook, and perhaps serves as the starting point for a longer term management approach
- A smart device(s) designed for the child that helps monitor symptoms and triggers in order to feed information back to the physician:
- Gestural input device for symptoms for kids (stuffed animal/keychain/necklace/bracelet) that a kid squeezes when their symptoms are bad
- Perhaps helps with emotional component (not scary or “something is wrong with me feeling”)
- Provides an indicator for adult caregivers or peers that the child has asthma and how to help (during an attack)
- A digital dashboard for a physician to track qualitative and quantitative data from the child and parents, alongside test results
- Educational components, such as videos or support groups
