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Heartband
(5-person-group project in Service Design Curriculum Program by Service Design Network, 2022)
With the human-centred perspective to look at the recovery journey for heart attacks patients who are 75+ and living with their spouse, this project is aimed to explore the possible needs in the recovery process and to design a service in assisting stakeholders for a better experience in this process.
User Research | Co-creation Workshops Facilitation | Prototyping and Experimentation | Visual Presentation
Heartband is an app platform that connects patients, caregivers and medical teams.
For better communication in providing the best management for the patients, it provides a set of services linked with different systems to simplify caregiving tasks.
Building upon a vision of medical record centralisation, Heartband is an app with a mobile device that connects patients, caregivers and medical teams to communicate for better treatment arrangements; As a handy organisational gadget; And as an emergency contact for these three stakeholders.
It is a project by a group of five from the three months Service Design Curriculum Program by Service Design Network.
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After interviews with some main stakeholders in their recovery process, we found out there are several difficulties which need to be considered when looking at elderly couples as the target group.
The life of a caregiver has a 360 change and is swapped by the caretaking tasks while finding the balance between their own lives.
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We re-framed our challenge to “How might we assure that the caregiver doesn’t run into a (mental) health problem themselves?”
Physical assistance and memorisation support are essential, hence the involvement of caregivers in this recovery journey took a major part. This role probably would be their child due to several difficulties for their elderly partner to act as the caregiver.
However, this responsibility would be an additional job on top of their child's own lives. Adding all these factors together, we identified a service need on how to ease the stress from the caretaking tasks and stay mentally healthy for the caregivers.
We believe that taking the children as the direct beneficiary of our service will lead to a better experience for the initial target group (75+ heart patient couples) in their recovery journey.
Design Process
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In the ideation phase, we co-created with 5 potential users) in an innovation jam session. After clustering and evaluating the ideas, we concluded with 2 potential concepts.
We role-played the key features of the 2 concepts with 2 service beneficiaries to collect comments from their first-hand perspective in caretaking to compare their pros and cons.
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The key feature of Heartband is its 2-level-aid service with the device worn on the patient and the app on the caregiver's mobile device, then a hotline to the medical team.
Heartclub, on the other hand, is an online support community between patients and caregivers to share their knowledge and help each other.
The prime objective of Heartband is to practise co-creation methodologies with involved parties through interviews and workshops.
To push further on the idea of practice, we prototyped both potential concepts Heartband and Heartclub with A/B testing. After two role-plays of the services with another two potential users. In the end, we finalised our idea and refined it with the feedback from the prototype.
The empiricism approach of the project (and the course) has allowed us to design this project with the stakeholder, but also limited us in developing the details of the services, such as the patient's permission to be monitored 24/7.