About Work
DIGITALISATION OF GERIATRIC CARE.

The objective of this project was to provide the elderly with the ability to lead more independent lives, with simple technological aids.

My role

User research

Wireframes

Visual Design

Prototyping

Devices

Android Tablet

Smart watch

Mobile Application

Title

Lead Designer

Problem.

Today, a large number of elderly people, do not have a good enough support system in place to provide them with sufficient welfare to be able lead comfortable lives. It is even more prominent in India, with the rise in the trend of nuclear families.

The family members usually look towards old age homes or house nursing agencies for solutions. Still, these provisions are minimal in number and extremely unorganized, leading to sub-optimum healthcare for the elderly. Moreover, health insurance in India is significantly limited and widely neglected when it comes to hospitalization and geriatric care, despite the rapid rise in the number of older adults. The key challenges are to provide them with access to facilities that help them lead independent lives.

Solution and Approach.

Being a remote internship, I was not actively involved in the research phase of the project. A project brief was handed over to me along with the findings of the research conducted by the HTIC team in Madras. My role was to make sense of the data collected.

After understanding the data collected, I presented my findings to the team using User Personas. I specifically choose to to apply “user personas” since the team was well-versed with the different scenarios, when and how the product will be used but were quite skeptical about the attributes, ambitions and feelings of our users.

There are 3 main user personas that were discovered after the analysis of the research findings.

USER PERSONA OF ELDERLY PEOPLE
USER PERSONA OF FAMILY MEMBERS
USER PERSONA OF CARETAKER

Rolling out solutions.

Elderly people need 24/7 support. Hence, a single caretaker looking after the needs of all the elderly people at the old age home will not be helpful. Secondly, elderly people are open to new technology. Hence, we concluded to make use of a smartwatch. After the team made this decision, we cross-verified our predictions with the same user group, and 90% of them were ready to use smart wearables

Caretakers were facing problems since they could not immediately respond to emergencies. Also, they only understood what kind of any emergency it is after reaching the room of the elderly person. To solve this problem, we decided to use a tablet to keep track of the elderly people. A tablet was used so that a larger number of elderly people could be tracked at a single glance, due to its large screen size.

Family members were not getting daily updates from the old age home. In case of an emergency, most of the times the family members were informed very late and hence they could not help much. As a result, we decided that the live data received from the watch will be sent to the respective family members of these elderly people using a mobile application. Hence, now the family members could get notifications and daily health updates.

1. Wearable device for the elderly

When a feasibility test was conducted amongst the elderly people for determining the wearable device that could be easily accepted by them, the most common answer was a pendent (elderly people in India commonly wear such an ornament around their neck) and a watch. After doing market research and consolidating with the finance team we decided to proceed with a smart watch. make a call to the elderly people to speak to them.This helps to provide 24/7 support to the eldelrly people.

Features included in the watch.

The elderly people wearing the watch can easily make an S0S Emergency call to the caretakers whenever the need be. Similarly, the caretakers can also make a call to the elderly people to speak to them. This helps to provide 24/7 support to the elderly people.

The elderly people were having trouble to take their medicines on time. Hence, this feature would give them reminders about their medicines. The data is input by the caretaker from their tablets.

The elderly people people at times felt lonely even though there were people around them. To assuage this feeling, we thought of introducing a “Q&A” feature which they need to answer daily. General questions like “How are you feeling today?” “Did you sleep well?” will be asked.

Site map of the smart watch.

Tablet Prototype

2. Tablet for caretaker.

India being the second largest digital market in the world we were confident that using the tablet would not be an issue for the caretakers. The various tasks of the caretaker are:

  • Attend to an emergency at the right time.
  • Know what kind of an emergency it is (Eg. Medical or some other need).
  • Keeping track of the location of the elderly.
  • Analyse the daily physical activity of the elderly people.

Features included in the tablet.

The SOS Emergency is triggered on the tablet when the elderly person wearing the watch presses the SOS Button or when they might fall (Since the watch has a feature of fall detection).

Since it was difficult for the elderly people to take their medicines on time this feature was introduced. The caretaker is notified if an elderly person has failed to take their medicines.

Dementia is common in elderly people. Hence, geofencing is used to track the location of the elderly people. A perimeter is set by the caretakers. If a certain boundary is crossed, the caretaker gets a notification.

If the inactivity time crosses a certain number of hours, the caretaker is alerted and asked to check up on the elderly person.

The caretakers keep track of the answers given by the elderly person during their daily Q&A session. This data can be used to analyse a person’s mood and provide special help if needed.

Wireframes.

Visual Design.

a.) Dashboard

While designing the dashboard, I had to take into consideration the cognitive load on the caretaker. Hence, I started prioritizing the information that will be of utmost importance to the caretaker in case of an emergency. They were:

  • What kind of an emergency it is?
  • Where to go, to attend to the emergency?

Hence, priority was given to the “EMERGENCY INDICATORS” and “ROOM NUMBER”

The most interesting part was designing the emergency indicators. We had a lot of discussions to decide whether to use colors or icons or icon + text or using only colored text. After doing a bit of research on color theory and going through the research conducted by the Nielsen Norman group, we went with using the icon + text + color combination.

b.) Individual User Screen.

The main questions I asked while designing these screens were:

  • How can the caretakers turn off the Emergency Indicator after attending to it?
  • What specific information should be shown for each user?
  • How to categorize the daily data received from the watch?
  • What if I want to view the historical data of a user?
  • How can I edit the personal information of an existing user?
  • Do we need to have some indicator that will inform us when the data is updated?

c.) Individual Feature Screen.

We wanted to use some kind of filter to classify the extensive data that will be generated from the watch. This filtering would help give a new dimension to the dataset. It would also help in some base level analysis of the data and help find some trends in the occurence of the various emergency indicators.

For example, if a trend is observed that most of the GEOFENCING indicators are ticked off during the evenings when the elderly people go for their daily walks then arrangements could be made to increase security during this time.

Since, this was an add-on feature, I only made one screen for tracking the SOS emeregency indicator. However, in the final development phase this feature was not implemented.

d.) History.

While uploading my designs on the Google Drive, I found this “View Details” icon on the right corner. It gave me an overview of all the activity that took place for that particular day/week/month. That is when I realised that even though I have implemented a feature-wise (or emergency indicator) filter I cannot still get an overview of all the activity that took place today. This data will be a mixture of a number of different emergency indicators and hence will require a seperate space.

However, I failed to convince the team how valuable and important this feature would be for the caretaker. How profound its insights would be! As a result, this feature was also scraped out during the development phase.

e.) Input Screens.

The caretaker needs to input the data of each new user as well as update certain information of existing users if need be. I took references from the Material Design guidelines to solve these screens.

Initially, I did not take in to account the space which will be occupied by the keyboard, and the orientation of the tablet. Hence, I had to work on the the alignment of a few text boxes again.

Also, the basic principles of form design such as allowing the user to go back, keeping the user informed about the next step, giving adequate information about the different states of the textboxes were taken into consideration.

Developed Screens.

View Prototype

3. Mobile app for family memberss.

The main aim of the app was so to inform the family members of the older adults immediately. This would help in improving the efforts taken during emergencies since there might be some things that the family members could suggest the caretakers to do in certain cases. Also, having access to daily data will keep the family members well informed.

Another surprising benefit of the app was that it helped to build conversations. Most of the elderly people said that they want to speak to their children and grandchildren but they did not have any topics to talk about. Hence, most of the conversations consisted of formal pleasantries only. Having such data on hand could bridge this gap. Help in improving the conversations between them since now the family members have partial knowledge about the daily activities of their elders which would help in fostering meaningful conversations.

Visual Design

a.) Main Screen

Before starting to design the app, I wanted to make sure that I am extremely clear with the main goal of the app. “PROVIDE DAILY DATA TO THE USER”

  • Can I view today’s data?
  • What if I want to view last week’s data?

Since, the mobile app was a secondary feature in the entire geriatric care system, I was not able to present my app to family members and get feedback.

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