Mini Prototype — for User Testing
In my previous post, I had outlined the concept and illustrated the use case scenarios. But it was based on 3 strong assumptions.
Assumption 1
I assume that when patients have their medication sorted in pouches for each dose of the day, it makes it easy for them to adhere to their pill routines.
This is also validated by the success of Pill Pack and later adopted by other pharmaceutical companies like CVS.
Assumption 2
When compared to regular app based alarms, a voice reminder (which interacts with the patient and gives appropriate triggers) is a more effective way of getting the job done.
Assumption 3
If the patient knows that they are accountable to their caregivers for their actions, they would be more punctual with their medication.
User Testing Plan
To test these assumptions, I plan to make a mini prototype and check it for 1 month with actual users.
Recruits
I plan to recruit one elderly person who would volunteer to take multivitamins as their ‘dummy medication’ for a period of one month. I also plan to recruit myself in this experiment as the second user, to experience things first hand.
Components of the prototype
(1) Medication — As mentioned before, I would use OTC Multivitamins as my dummy medication with the consent of the elderly person.
(2) Pouches- These would be neatly packed and labelled in these FDA approved zip lock pouches.
(3) Voice Reminder Demo - The voice reminder demo would be done by integrating an Amazon Echo into the Pill box. Thee ‘Drop-In’ feature of Alexa would be used to imitate the automatic voice reminder feature of the solution. The recruit will have one Alexa device integrated into the prototype and I would have the other Alexa device. I would imitate Alexa and act as the voice reminder everyday for the recruit to have their medication. The recruit would be told that their caregiver would get a report of their adherence from me weekly.
(4) The casing — I plan to laser cut a box out of wood to house the Alexa and the medication pouches, something on thee lines of the image shown below.
Things to track during the experiment
Although this experiment may not replicate the real life scenario, it would be a good marker to get validation for the following:
(1) If voice reminders from a third person (human/Alexa, who is affiliated to your caregiver) is powerful enough to motivate you to take your medication. It would be important to see at what times does it become irritating or less effective.
(2) Unhappy paths or Failed scenarios: While designing we may consider many use case scenarios, but it would be interesting to see how a real life situation plays out and how would the voice system deal with such scenarios.
(3) By weekly checking up on the number of pills remaining in the box, we can estimate if the experiment is actually working or if there are any loop holes in our assumptions.
