Homedoctor: Creating an at-home health robot for the future of care
Inside the making of Homedoctor: How our team brought it from concept to reality.
After winning a Red Dot Award Design Award, an IDA Design Award, and an Indigo Design Award for our work on Homedoctor Medbot with Telecom Design, we spoke to the propelland project team for a behind-the-scenes look at how they helped bring Homedoctor Medbot to life. Discover more about Medbot’s design and our vision for the future of healthcare.
How did the work with Homedoctor come about?
A few years ago propelland worked with Securitas Direct on a telemedicine project: we developed Protección Senior, a holistic home care service for seniors aging in place. One of our clients at Securitas Direct later went to work for Homedoctor, a startup creating high-quality medical technology for the home. Based on our proven experience leveraging digital technologies to make care more accessible, Homedoctor reached out to ask us for help designing a new carrying case for a medical device. That initial project evolved into designing an all new at-home digital patient experience with Homedoctor Medbot.
How does Medbot improve upon Homedoctor’s previous health robot?
Homedoctor started in 2018 with a much simpler telemedicine phone service. The next iteration turned it into a household physical IoT device docked to a charging station. The problem was that this device was most often kept stored away. It would only be used as often as people got sick, perhaps once or twice a month. When people did decide to take it out, one major complaint was its battery would often need to be charged again before it could be used.
To encourage people to treat Homedoctor’s device as a more prominent household item, we gave the charging station a second use. Instead of solely acting as a charger, the new Medbot case displays temperature, humidity, and air quality. We also made sure to give it a sleek, more beautiful design because when you have something beautiful, you are more willing to put it in view. As an additional benefit, our team integrated an internal ozone disinfection system that activates every time you close the case to sanitize medical equipment after use.
What inspired the Medbot solution for Homedoctor?
The inspiration was best-in-class design. We used a lot of references from Apple, aiming for seamless and elegant interactions with the case, similar to the iPad. We also took the end-user into greater consideration. We knew Homedoctor would be particularly useful to those with limited mobility like adults in their late years. But anyone could benefit from at-home diagnosis and treatment, so anyone should be able to easily use Medbot to receive care. Our main goal was to make Medbot’s design intuitive and comforting so that it would have universal appeal to different types of users.
What were some of the challenges that the team encountered throughout the course of the project, and how did you overcome them?
The most difficult part was designing a product that we weren’t able to physically see in front of us. Homedoctor is in Spain, the design team was in Mexico, and the engineering took place in China. This wide-scale global collaboration made physical prototyping less ideal. When you’re designing something, screens don’t reflect the reality of the product very well. We had to use tools like augmented reality to aid us in the product development process. We had to make several augmented reality visualizations to show what Medbot looked like open, closed, and taken apart. This allowed us to quickly create multiple mid-fidelity iterations and decide which we wanted to move forward into high-fidelity.
This project was the result of strong global teamwork between Homedoctor, Telecom Design, and propelland. Having constant input and feedback from the client, engineers, and designers made for a breakthrough in how we approach projects at propelland. Normally product development takes a really long time because the work gets passed from the design team to the engineering team and so on. But by having our engineers and designers working in parallel, we were able to take the product from idea to mass production in less than a year. We were a globally distributed mind focused on a single task. Something I always say to the team is that products should be designed from the inside to the outside, and then from the outside to the inside, and that’s how we did it.
What excites you the most about the connected health space in 2022 and beyond?
Products like Homedoctor Medbot are really going to make a breakthrough in the connected health space. I have been hearing about telemedicine for a long time, but I think that we’ve finally reached a point where we’re creating telemedicine experiences that make people feel comfortable. Patients and providers alike can trust that they are receiving accurate health information directly from their devices.
For example, Medbot includes a small device that looks like a pen, but it’s actually a diagnostic tool with a camera on the end. When a patient puts it in their mouth, the doctor can see that view in real-time from their screen. Previously the closest you could get to that experience was to point a smartphone camera inside your mouth, but now we’re designing products specifically catered to a comfortable and intuitive telemedicine experience. I think that’s only going to continue to evolve.
In the next stage of our work with Homedoctor, we’re creating a healthcare experience for seniors. As people age, they can become more forgetful and have to be more careful. It can also be harder for them to use devices they are unfamiliar with. That’s why for the next evolution of Homedoctor, we’re developing a smart ring that grants doctors instant access to a patient’s health data. Connected health devices can be really technical. You need to have a smartphone. You need to have an app. You have to have an account. There are a lot of clicks in the process. The future of these devices will be about reducing that friction to create more seamless patient experiences.
