Alli
Connected Emotional Care
This project partnered The Innovation School at Glasgow School of Art and the Institute of Cancer Sciences at the University of Glasgow which looked at the future of Precision Medicine Cancer services.
As a final year Product Design student at The Glasgow School of Art, I was presented with the project brief to produce a vision of the 10-year future of cancer services based on trends which relate to Precision Medicine (PM).
The project involved close work with clinicians, patients, scientists, staff at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and Clinical Innovation Zone, academics from Glasgow University, patient representatives, staff at Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre and design experts from GOODD design consultancy and Studio AndThen.
This project aimed to speculatively and analytically investigate future cancer treatment and care in relation to Precision Medicine. The field of Precision Medicine has transformed what it means to be a patient and a professional working in this space.
This work formed part of a published paper in August 2019.
The Process
Part 1
Part 1 was delivered by Emma Strain, Tony Charalambous, Teresa Raina and myself.
Observations:
As part of our initial research, we visited Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and Clinical Innovation Zone. Presentations from Molecular Pathology Node specialists and strategic project managers helped us to understand more about the practice of Precision Medicine. They highlighted the importance of departmental sharing in the future of Cancer care.
Insights:
As a team, we mapped out the stakeholders related to the law, precision medicine and cancer care. Then we divided our map into the private sector, public sector and mixed, before selecting the most interesting stakeholders. These stakeholders were; private healthcare companies, the NHS, the doctor-patient relationship and external support charities. So, we were able to create individual user journey maps for each of these cases.
Team organising stages of future consequences
Gathering stages of consequences
At this point, we engaged with workshops from Studio AndThen and GOODD consultancy to draw out initial insights. We began creating speculative consequences based on our chosen three stakeholders. From these consequences, we established five categories which we believed would play a part in our future world view.
They can be categorised as; wearable technologies, dignity through dying, biobanks and their data, the future of opting out and the commodification of personal data.
It was recognised that they didn't create linear sequences of events. Instead, there are diverging pathways for genetic predisposition or lifestyle factors which result in a Cancer diagnosis.
Exhibition Concept:
As a team, we decided to represent the two diverging pathways in our exhibition display. Further discussion around each of the pathways resulted in a name change. Instead, the exhibition would represent a preferable and a potential future vision, giving a nod to the dystopian and utopian futures we foresaw.
We designed an exhibition stand which allowed the user to be the lawmaker, interacting with the probable or preferable future where individually created laws acted as the pivotal factors. The lawmaker would shift between the five pivotal points which outline our five future world scenarios to create their world view.
We decided this was the best way to communicate the narrative of someone living and working in our future world.
Final Concept Direction:
Each face represented the five categories; wearable technologies, dignity & death, advertising, genetic & personal identity and dietary restrictions.
An outline of the world vision is the starting mirrored face. i.e. Due to advances in precision medicine, cancers can be traced back to genetic disposition or lifestyle & environmental factors. This has given the NHS new criteria by which different patients have priority for funding when there are increasingly limited financial resources.
Each of the other faces presented different scenarios on either side of the boards speculating a preferable or potential future of each of the categories.
We were conscious of creating an accessible exhibition as it is on public exhibition. So, we carefully worked out dimensions of the exhibition stand, especially the mirrored middle face which would allow the user to envision themselves as the lawmaker in the world.
Final Iteration:
We developed and refined the visual communication of our future world to be more accessible by the general public. For example; instead of a blank frame, we assigned a colour to each of the five individual categories which shape our world and created a gradient. The gradient implied a flow for the lawmaker to use, with the starting point as the darkest blue and the finishing point as the lightest blue.
Illustrations were laser cut into card and placed on each of the blank faces and paired with a descriptor.
At the exhibition, we asked members of the public to actively engage with our stand by acting as the lawmaker. The general public created their version of a preferable world view by placing stickers on their chosen side.
This helped establish whether we had created a world vision people could connect with and would want to be involved in. It also allowed for greater post-analysis of our speculative future and whether the small sample of participants are tending towards a potential or preferable future.
Illustrations were laser cut into card and placed on each of the blank faces and paired with a descriptor.
At the exhibition, we asked members of the public to actively engage with our stand by acting as the lawmaker. The general public created their version of a preferable world view by placing stickers on their chosen side.
This helped establish whether we had created a world vision people could connect with and would want to be involved in. It also allowed for greater post-analysis of our speculative future and whether the small sample of participants are tending towards a potential or preferable future.
User choosing their preferable future world
User acting as lawmaker
Part 2
I decided to dive deeper into wearable technologies and personal devices seen in the future world my legal team created in part 1.
Observations:
During my initial research, I became interested in the patient-doctor relationship. I was curious about the data shared, how it’s protected and what information is needed but not given.
Insights:
I started by mapping the interactions of the stakeholders who were involved in getting a patient in front of an oncologist. This created a wider web and helped to establish a narrative.
From this, I selected a probable world persona, drawn from part 1 to explore further. I created a series of prototyping videos, exploring different user journeys of this persona who led an unhealthy lifestyle which made him a lower priority on the NHS. In creating these videos, I became interested in the sharing of data for personal benefit.
I began building a speculative future scenario, by prototyping the timeline from hospital to home of the patient. This individual’s healthcare journey is reflective of the unique patient pathways created for every individual who receives treatment.
When I created this timeline, I started to pose critical questions throughout wondering if digital interactions impacted a patients quality of care and whether emotional changes can be drawn from digital behaviours.
Opportunity:
Detections in behavioural changes as seen through the monitoring of emotional analytics, could benefit your healthcare pathway by creating more individualised plans.
By detecting significant mood swings through the patient’s digital behaviours, patient pathways can be changed more quickly than if they were to wait until their next clinical visit.
Concept:
I focused on creating more individualised care pathways based on the emotional data recorded through your digital interactions with services throughout the treatment process.
Using a ‘thinking through making’ method, I played with the fluidity of patient journeys using thread, where each thread represented a different patient’s care plan. Aiming to understand how to create flexibility within set parameters, for example, key stages in the individuals' treatment pathway.
I realised the level of digital literacy by the user would impact how individualised their patient plan was. To explore a users digital literacy further, I digitising my findings into a collage where each item represents the colour, object, personality, tone of voice, font, core value, activity and material to give an overall outline of my concept.
From this, I was able to explore a more specific persona of someone who is very digitally literate visiting their Oncologist through stop motion video using wooden characters before repeating this process for an older generational digitally illiterate.
Prototyping the interactions of varying levels of digital literacy by users enabled me to then created a digital literacy spectrum.
This helped to understand the difference between someone who generates a lot of data online through their heavy usage of digital interfaces and someone who has few digital interactions and is harder to monitor and detect changes in mood.
I decided to focus on someone who is extremely digitally illiterate, with little interest in new technologies.
Final Concept Direction:
I created a connected suite of lifestyle products which alert a digitally illiterate user to changes in their healthcare pathway based on their digital interactions:
A patients domestic signalling tool,
A patients self-reflection app and
A clinician’s web portal.
Creating the self reflection app
Early research showed people responded well to road signs & maps and wanted to integrate this into the interface making it more easily understood by people who are less digitally inclined. This formed the basis of my app structure.
Three pathways were integrated into the patient’s self-reflection tool. The sections of motivation, capacity and opportunity would ask different types of questions based on the emotional health of a patient.
I prototyped this using InVision Studio.
Creating a signalling tool
I created a home signalling device that would alert the user to changes in their healthcare pathway through variations in light intensity. The trigger is sent by the nurse practitioner when anomalous results are noticed.
Creating a web platform
Having created a digital app prototype for my patient’s self-reflection tool, I was then able to create the nurse’s web platform.
The web platform has been created to show how the nurse practitioner might flag emotional changes in a patient’s healthcare pathway.
The platform highlights three main functionality points;
Concern cases,
Completed flagged cases and
Patient profiles.
