Early Explorations
02/28/17 — 03/08/17
02/28: Project Kickoff:
Project introduction by Jon Rodriguez from Philips Cocreate team.
The project revolves around asthmatic kids in the US with a target age group of 4–8 yrs.
Some key takeaways from the presentation:
- Interesting stakeholder landscape as well as lifestyle.
- 1 in 10 or 14% kids have asthma in US.
- Alleviated by allergies- “Cannot be cured but it can be managed”.
- Preventive and relieving medication. Kids need to know about the asthma regime leading to behavior change.
- Triggers (pollution, pollen, activities etc.) are different for each person, it’s important to understand the reasons/ triggers.
- Ways to keep track- diary etc. Identifying the trigger is crucial to form an action plan with the doctor.
- Possible data sources: Air pollution, weather, medications, etc..
- Challenge:
- How might we support kids and parents of asthmatic kids to understand asthma triggers better?
- How can we support transition of children (4–10) from parental management to self management for the asthma care?- Speeding up the transition for self management: Passive → aware → reactive → proactive.
03/02: Early explorations :
Based off of our research on the topic, we started categorizing our understandings based on:
1. Who would the stakeholders be?
2. What are the potential locations for the kids to be, in their daily routine?
While thinking about different issues that the kids might suffer from, due to asthma, some interesting areas of intervention came forth which do not necessarily relate to the medical conditions, e.g: social anxiety, ignorance of parents or teachers, high costs and unaffordability of insurance by parents of these kids. These raised some important questions around the factors that affect the children and that’s when we thought it would be a good idea to think about the stigmas that are associated with the kids using the inhalers/ nebulizers in public or even in daily life. Through these discussions, we were able to find some rich opportunity areas and decided to move further with the research that could answer some of key questions we had around these opportunities. Some of the questions included:
- What is the relationship between asthma and physical health and obesity?
- How costly is asthma treatment and how dependent is healthy asthma treatment and prevention on good insurance?
- How does asthma education look like today?
- Can social anxiety cause asthma in children?
03/06: Research & initial service ideas
With the continuing research, we convened to share the research findings with each other. After the last class, each one of us attempted to answer the questions and explore the areas of interest through secondary research as well as interviewing people who had asthma in the past. Our research findings guided us to note down some pain points and interest areas. Further, we brainstormed around some of the initial ideas.
We talked a lot about some our findings of the services that exist out there and that included things like BreathMobile, a mobile asthma clinic that visits pre-schools and K-12 schools and community centers every 4–6 weeks seeing children with asthma. This was inspiring since it addressed issues we have been talking about, like the provision of expensive medical equipments for low-income groups.
03/08 :
From our previous class, we planned to dig further to try and see what territory interested us the most. We started affinity mapping stakeholders and locations on one side and connected each of the group to issues they might relate to on the other side, to get a visual idea of the main stakeholders and issues that might arise.
Over the spring break, we plan to talk to some of the stakeholders we enlisted along with continuing secondary research to get a lay of the land.
