Karim Sandid
Blow: Improving Experience for People with Asthma
Summary
How could Human-Centred Design improve User Experience in Healthcare through technology?
The use case of Asthma
Additional info
Early stage: user research and secondary research.
Looking for people to collaborate on this project . If you're interested do not hesitate to contact me for more info / discussions.
One of the most critical challenge of modern healthcare is to switch from a curative to a preventive model. In fact, ischaemic heart disease, stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were the top 3 global causes of death in 2016 [1]. For this we need more patient-centred care, adapting medical care to all individuals with their proper social context, lifestyle, physiology and will. This is the shift to personalised medicine [2].
The use of technology in healthcare has been trendy these past years with Big Tech companies investing massively in this sector. But technology is not the panacea, it is instead an other tool at our disposal, for sure a powerful one. Neither good nor bad by essence, technology is what we do with it. Big Data, wearables, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), social networks, mobile phones and so many more are critical opportunities for personalised medicine. How ? First by allowing a better knowledge of people lifestyle [3] and a more personalised definition of what Health is for each individual, thanks to the volume and the complexity of data collected [4]. Secondly mobile phones and wearables are omnipresent media in our life and can offer various contextual interactions and feedbacks, influencing user’s behaviour. The right feedback delivered at the right time can help users change their habits more efficiently [5]. Finally, we could determine even more individually when is the best moment for this feedback to be delivered using AI.
This intersection between the switch to a preventive model and the context of developing exponential technologies [6,7] creates the momentum for a deep healthcare transformation. This fast-paced technological innovation movement has been mainly driven by technology-centred methods instead of user-centred design methods. However a human-centred approach of technology in healthcare would be more appropriate to enable more patient-centred care, fulfill user needs and thereby enable more substantial adoption and impact [8].
That’s why I make the central hypothesis that human-centred design can improve experience for all stakeholders in healthcare (patients, health professionals and others) by creating pertinent and efficient technology applications.
(1) Global Health Estimates 2016: Deaths by Cause, Age, Sex, by Country and by Region. 2000-2016. Geneva, World Health Organisation; 2018
(2) Gray, J. A. M. (2013) The shift to personalised and population medicine. The Lancet. [Online] 382 (9888), 200– 201. [online]. Available from: https://www.thelancet.com/jour... abstract (Accessed 22 December 2019).
(3) McConnell, M. V. et al. (2017) Feasibility of Obtaining Measures of Lifestyle From a Smartphone App: The MyHeart Counts Cardiovascular Health Study. JAMA Cardiology. [Online] 2 (1), 67. [online]. Available from: http://cardiology.jamanetwork.... (Accessed 22 December 2019).
(4) Klein, A. (2016) Doctor as data scientist: a high-dimensional view of health [online]. Available from: https:// medium.com/@binarybottle/doctor-as-data-scientist-a-high-dimensional-view-of-health-4a35de24903d (Accessed 22 December 2019).
(5) Samuel, A. (2018) How Your Phone Can Help You Set Better Habits. Harvard Business Review [online]. Available from: https://hbr.org/2018/03/how-yo... (Accessed 22 December 2019).
(6) Terri Cooper et al. (2018) 2018 Global health care outlook The evolution of smart health care. p.32. [online]. Available from: https://www2.deloitte.com/cont... Care/gx-lshc-hc-outlook-2018.pdf.
(7) Thomas, S. (2017) Exponential Technologies Could Put Health Care on the Cusp of Transformation [online]. Available from: https://deloitte.wsj.com/cfo/2... (Accessed 27 December 2019).
(8) Velloso, E. et al. (2018) ‘Challenges of Emerging Technologies for Human-centred Design: Bridging the Gap Between Inquiry and Invention’, in Proceedings of the 30th Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction. OzCHI ’18. [Online]. 2018 New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 609–611. [online]. Available from: http:// doi.acm.org/10.1145/3292147.3293451 (Accessed 27 December 2019).
