YOMO: Designing for a Menopausal Transition

This is the last entry of our INDEX Challenge project. The outcome is called YOMO — Your own medical observation.

Context

To start off, reflect on the past few weeks working from home because of COVID-19. A notification buzzes, you get a phone call, someone interrupts you when you’re deep in work and it’s harder to separate personal from professional. our everyday lives are full of interruptions.

On top of all this, If you’re a woman going through a Menopausal transition, the symptoms it brings are one more annoying interruption. Except, you can’t put them on silent or snooze them for another day.

If you aren’t among those who will go through menopause, you probably know someone who will. It’s hard to completely empathize with something you won’t experience.

Through Yomo we see health literacy as a process of understanding yourself not only through clinical, tested treatment options but through a community of care that becomes a companion to navigate and focus on the crucial transitions that set the stage for an improved life, body, mind, and community.

We believe that a holistic conversation about aging in women in turn contributes to ensuring healthy lives and promotes the well-being of all ages that is essential to sustainable development.

In the crucial transitions of the reproductive journey, like menarche and pregnancy, products, and services that address reproduction and fertility are abundant, because fertility drives profit and is linked to societal images of female desirability.

YOMO

Yomo is a health literacy service that accompanies women through their health by focussing on collective care around critical transitions for an improved life.

Features

Yomo introduces its users to a community of women who share and discuss topics related to reproductive health. The treatment and care library not only connects women to experts but also helps them be well informed about their treatment options and lifestyle choices that impact their well being. Using the telehealth feature, women can consult experts of their choice to seek medical advice.

Finally, Yomo offers an efficient way to track both symptoms as well as treatments. The Yomo ecosystem also expands to wearables making it easy for women to check-in on the go.

In this system map, we want to highlight specific key stakeholders that distinguish our proposed business model.

Knowing that research on menopause transition in women is currently a niche area, our business model not only serves on the user’s end but also is designed for strategic partnerships of health data to understand the holistic aspects of bio-behavioral health.

Menopause is a variable experience that researchers haven’t been able to standardize across different cultures and geographies. We propose designing specific ways of crowdsourcing health information that can support newer qualitative methods of research to address the issue.

Data partnership with the tech companies that currently have a strong digital infrastructure for health tracking is important partners in maintaining records of symptoms and daily activity. Working directly with these companies will help keep on track of data privacy and feed into research institutions and hospitals.

In addition, we want to partner with healthcare experts, like doctors and frontline workers to offer not only the tools for patient screening but also statistics for better consultation. In compliance Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

The insights signaled towards making Yomo a bridge between the individual and collective care, balancing the knowledge of lived experiences along with that of experts and designing a language that acknowledges that therapy and care plays as significant a role as a clinical treatment

The particular topic of menopause that we researched, allowed us to look at topics of taboo in health at large. We all go through a journey of crucial transitions, irrespective of age, gender, and race. Yomo offers the framework and vision for Designing experiences that address taboo topics in health that affect an individual and impact their immediate community.