marten-assignment4-selfservice.md

CHLOE MARTEN
QUANT HUMANISTS
SPRING 2018
25 02 2018

Assignment 4: Quant Self Service, link to assignment

The Question

I have been using a Fitbit for the past few months with interest in monitoring my heart rate. Outside of establishing my resting heart rate, I have yet to make much use of the data and what it means. In an earlier assignment, I reviewed Jakob Eg Larsen’s longitudinal tracking of his heart rate. After measuring his heart rate for over 4 years using different tracking devices, Larsen was able to correlate spikes in his heart rate with major illnesses. From this, I became interested in how heart rate can be used to signify health problems.

The Persona

Fitness and heart rate trackers are normally marketed to athletic people or people looking to lose weight, helping them get the most out of their workouts. For my service design mini project, I wanted to explore a different audience, one who suffers the most from heart-related ailments: seniors. After doing some research online, I landed on a persona as represented by Jean.

Jean

Jean's User Journey

The Service

Through Jean’s pain points, I identified a problem which I believe can be solved by recent technology. While wearables provide users the data to monitor their fitness and heart rate, they don’t necessarily do a good job at explaining what it means or what to do. This is likely intentional because the companies that create these devices don’t want to be held liable for providing medical advice. So why not create a service that connects your tracker to your doctor for examination. In the case of seniors, this service should be easy to use and require little effort. From this, I designed Nurse.ai, a chatbot service that monitors your heart rate data via your preferred wearable. It detects any potential issues or inconsistencies, and then automatically connects this data with your doctor to review.

Prototype

Blueprint

The Stakeholders

In order for this service to work, it will need to connect with several third parties, including the patient’s healthcare practitioners and various technology platforms to make it a seamless experience.

Final Presentation

Love the demo on slide 8! I think the chat-bot for medical monitoring approach is cool. I've read some conflicting research on what heart rate data can do for us, and whether it can be trusted, but I think it's definitely worth exploring.

Some thoughts:

• to detect anomalous data, bots often need a corpus of past data on what is "normal", thinking through how that might be collected or sourced in a speedy way would likely be key to deploying a service that serves seniors with immediate needs
• might there be a solution for folks who aren't as tech savvy? perhaps directing the bot chats to a caretaker or a relative if the heart rate is erratic? or maybe a plan b that allows them to dial a TeleDoc and talk to a human?
• a comparative analysis of how this service solves for issues beyond babylon or florence offerings would also be cool, each has particular features that make them advantageous

Looking forward to chatting about this in class! 💯

This is likely intentional because the companies that create these devices don’t want to be held liable for providing medical advice
⇒ totally! Right on point. There is a lot of heralding of new tech and the possibilities of gaining new “insights” into health, but how far companies are willing to go to back up what can be derived from that data is totally fuzzy. We’re glad you call this out!

• Excellent presentation and delivery. You did a great job establishing the problem statement, addressing the pain points, and how your service proposal might address them.
  As noted in class: your service brings up a lot of new ideas around the future of health care, the relationships that patients might have with their healthcare providers, and the role that technology can play in mediating those interactions. Having these prototypes are helpful pieces for discussion to unpack the complexity of our existing health services and what kinds of systemic issues might need to be addressed in order to improve or create alternatives.

Great work!

Just a quick addendum to Joey's feedback:
Pay attention to HIPAA compliance issues, and the comparative analysis of other applications that provide such a service to distinguish your work from theirs. :) Thanks for such a great presentation!