Social Innovation Design Inspirations
Two cool healthcare design projects
This week my group begins the challenge of crafting a project in the design for social innovation category. In honor of this topic I wanted to delve into two projects that inspire me.
Thumy by Renata Souza Luque
Thumy is a product designed and produced by my friend Renata Souza Luque. Inspired by her cousin who was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at a young age, Renata designed a product to make his experience with insulin shots easy and fun. She created an insulin pen designed with the small, clumsy hands of children in mind. She also created sets of playful temporary tattoos that children can put on their skin so that they do not inject themselves in the same spot.
I love Renata’s design because she tackled the entrenched medical equipment industry from a new angle. Medical equipment is constantly evolving, but it is not often the site of child-centered design. She identified a problem by stepping out of her own perspective and looking at the world through the lens of her young cousin and other kids like him. I like that the final product looks less like a scary needle and more like a building piece that a child would play with. I also am impressed by the creativity of the tattoo idea.
MedSinc by ThinkMD
MedSinc is an application for tablets or other portable computers that was created by two pediatricians in Vermont in 2014. It is designed to be utilized by frontline healthcare workers in countries where access to doctors and healthcare centers is limited. I encountered this application while visiting a friend living in Zambia. My friend worked for an organization called Healthy Kids Brighter Future (HKBF) based in Lusaka, Zambia. HKBF is working to stop school age Zambian children from dropping out of school because of preventable or treatable illnesses. They train select teachers to be school health workers, and these health workers become adept at recognizing symptoms and diagnosing what level of further care is needed. More than 90% of Zambian children enroll in school, so school is the most effective place for this front line of defense to take place.
HKBF developed a version of the application, together with ThinkMD, specifically for the needs the Zambian needs. The school health workers used to do all of their record keeping on paper, but now all appointments are conducted using the application. Once a child’s details and symptoms are carefully logged through a combination of talking, touching, and observing, the application spits out a likely diagnosis and a level of severity that will aid the school health worker in determining how best to help the child. The app is not meant as a replacement for trained doctors, but is instead meant to streamline the process of getting a sick child the right treatment, in an area where going to a far away clinic or hospital could be hugely inconvenient for a family. The app functions offline and uploads anonymous data to the cloud once every few weeks when a worker visits the school and connects the device to the internet.
My time in Zambia overlapped with a weeklong training HKBF conducted to teach school health workers how to use the app, so I was able to observe the training and users’ reactions. The app is simple to learn and straightforward to use, cuts down on record keeping time for the teachers, and shortens the data collection time (previously paperwork was collected, sorted and logged by hand, which could take months). The DataSinc application on the backend of MedSinc allows for analyzing and visualizing the logged data, in order to better understand and serve the needs of the country.
